MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Cong Li – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Multi-Sensor Fusion for Robust Simultaneous Localization and Mapping   Abstract:  Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) consists of the estimation of the state of the robot, and the reconstruction of the surrounding environment simultaneously. Over the last few decades, numerous state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms are proposed and frequently utilized in the robotics community. However, a SLAM algorithm [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Naman Gupta

GHC 6501

Title: State Estimation for Legged Robots using Proprioceptive Sensors   Abstract:  Mobile robots need good estimates of their state to perform closed-loop control in structured and unstructured environments. A number of existing algorithms rely on data fusion from multiple sensors to compute these estimates. This work focuses on state estimation using sensors which only measure [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Harjatin Baweja

NSH 1305

Title: Leveraging Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning for contact and non-contact based plant phenotyping.     Abstract:  Effective plant breeding requires scientists to find correspondences between genetic markers and desirable physical traits (phenotypes) of the genotype. Robotics can aid the acceleration of breeding pipeline by facilitating high throughput plant phenotyping. In this thesis we propose [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Suhit Kodgule

Title: Active Sampling for Planetary Rover Exploration Abstract: Planetary Robotics research has expanded beyond simply developing robust navigation strategies for rovers to providing them with the capability of performing intelligent actions so as to develop a better interpretation and understanding of the environment. This will become essential in the future, when rovers explore regions far [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Matthew Collins – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 3002

Title:  Efficient Planning for High-Speed MAV Flight in Unknown Environments Using Sparse Topological Graphs   Abstract: Safe high-speed autonomous navigation for MAVs in unknown environments requires fast planning to enable the robot to adapt and react quickly to incoming information about obstacles within the world.  Furthermore, when operating in environments not known a priori, the robot [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Siva Chaitanya Mynepalli

Title: Recognizing Tiny Faces Abstract: Objects are naturally captured over a continuous range of distances, causing dramatic changes in appearance, especially at low resolutions. Recognizing such small objects at range is an open challenge in object recognition. In this paper, we explore solutions to this problem by tackling the fine-grained task of face recognition. State-of-the-art embeddings [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Data Centric Robot Learning

NSH 4305

Abstract: While robotics has made tremendous progress over the last few decades, most success stories are still limited to carefully engineered and precisely modeled environments. Getting these robots to work in the complex and diverse world that we live in has proven to be a difficult challenge. Interestingly, one of the most significant successes in [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Exploiting Point Motion, Shape Deformation, and Semantic Priors for Dynamic 3D Reconstruction in the Wild

NSH 3002

Abstract: With the advent of affordable and high-quality smartphone cameras, any significant events will be massively captured both actively and passively from multiple perspectives. This opens up exciting opportunities for low-cost high-end VFX effects and large scale media analytics. However, automatically organizing large scale visual data and creating a comprehensive 3D scene model is still [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Learning and Reasoning with Visual Correspondence in Time

NSH 3002

Abstract: There is a famous tale in computer vision: Once, a graduate student asked the famous computer vision scientist Takeo Kanade: "What are the three most important problems in computer vision?" Takeo replied: "Correspondence, correspondence, correspondence!" Indeed, even for the most commonly applied Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets), they are internally learning representations that lead to [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Forecasting and Controlling Behavior by Learning from Visual Data

NSH 4305

Abstract: Achieving a precise predictive understanding of the future is difficult, yet widely studied in the natural sciences. Significant research activity has been dedicated to building testable models of cause and effect. From a certain view, a perfect predictive model of the universe is the “holy grail”; the ultimate goal of science. If we had [...]