Student Talks
Cellular Event Detection in Time-lapse Live Cell Microscopy Images
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Computer vision analysis of live cells in time-lapse microscopy images enables long-term continuous monitoring of a large number of intact cells with minimal human intervention, which has not been feasible by existing image processing methods with cellular staining images. Of critical importance in time-lapse microscopy image analysis is to understand the [...]
Differentially Constrained Motion Planning with State Lattice Motion Primitives
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Robot motion planning with differential constraints has received a great deal of attention in the last few decades, yet it still remains a challenging problem. Among a number of reasons, three stand out. First, the differential constraints that most physical robots exhibit render the coupling between the control and state spaces [...]
Design and Control of a Flapping Flight Micro Aerial Vehicle
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Miniature flapping flight systems hold great promise in matching the agility of their natural counterparts, bees, flies, and hummingbirds. Characterized by reciprocating wing motion, unsteady aerodynamics, and the ability to hover, insect-like flapping flight presents an interesting locomotion strategy capable of functioning at small size scales and is still a current [...]
Vision-Based Navigation for a Small Fixed-Wing Airplane in Urban Environment
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: An urban operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demands a high level of autonomy for tasks presented in a cluttered environment. While fixed-wing UAVs are well suited for long-endurance missions at a high altitude, enabling them to navigate inside an urban area brings another level of challenges. Their inability to hover [...]
Augmenting Cartographic Resources and Assessing Roadway State for Vehicle Navigation
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Maps are important for both human and robot navigation. Given a route, driving assistance systems consult maps to guide human drivers to their destinations. Similarly, topological maps of a road network provide a robotic vehicle with information about where it can drive and what driving behaviors it should use. Maps simplify [...]
Lumenhancement: Exploiting Appearance for Planetary Modeling
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Planetary environments are among the most hazardous, remote and uncharted in the solar system. They are also critical to the search for life, human exploration, resource extraction, infrastructure and science. These applications represent the prime unexploited opportunity for automated modeling, but robots are under-utilized for this purpose. There is urgent need [...]
Attention-guided Algorithms to Retarget and Augment Animations, Stills, and Videos
Event Location: GHC 4301Abstract: Still pictures, animations and videos are used by artists to tell stories visually. Computer graphics algorithms create visual stories too, either automatically, or by assisting artists. Why is it so hard to build algorithms that can manipulate the content created by a visual artist? A primary reason is that artists introspect [...]
Robust Force-Controlled Walking on the Sarcos Humanoid Robot
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: obust to both external disturbances and modeling error. We describe a walking controller that functions by coordinating multiple low-dimensional optimal controllers. We break a simplified model of the dynamics into several subsystems that have limited interaction. Each of the subsystems are augmented with coordination variables and we use a Dynamic Programming [...]
Shape for Contact
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: End effectors play a privileged role in the manipulation chain. They contact the world. That role gives them an advantageous position to convey function and contribute to a solution to the manipulation problem. This thesis proposal explores the problem of designing the shape of a rigid end effector to perform a [...]
Looking Beyond Shape for Instance Recognition of Weakly-Textured Objects
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Object instance detection is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision and has been extensively studied in the past. From a single image, the goal is to detect a specific object from an arbitrary viewpoint in a cluttered environment. While the use of discriminative point-based features such as SIFT works well for [...]