Student Talks
Hippocampal Representations and the Learning of Cognitive Maps
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Understanding how neural circuits in the brain enable complex, flexible behavior is now a tangible endeavor. This has in large part been made possible by the ability to record from neurons in mammals, such as rats and monkeys, as the animals are performing a behavioral task. One can then ask how [...]
Scene Recovery and Rendering Techniques Under Global Light Transport
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Light interacts with the world around us in complex ways. These interactions can broadly be classified as direct illumination - when a scene point is illuminated directly by the light source, or indirect illumination - when a scene point receives light that is reflected, refracted or scattered off other scene elements. [...]
Geolocation with Range: Robustness, Efficiency and Scalability
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This thesis explores the topic of geolocation with range. A robust method for localization and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is proposed. This method uses a polar parameterization of the state to achieve accurate estimates of the nonlinear and multi-modal distributions in range-only systems. Several experimental evaluations on real robots reveal [...]
A Process for Conducting (Doctoral) Research in Robotics
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Sanjiv Singh is a Research Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He received his B.S in Computer Science from the University of Denver (1983) M.S in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University (1985) and a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon (1995). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of [...]
Minimalistic Dynamic Climbing Locomotion
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Dynamics in locomotion is highly useful, as can be seen in animals and is becoming apparent in robots. For instance, chimpanzees are dynamic climbers that can reach virtually any part of a tree and even move to neighboring trees, while sloths are quasistatic climbers confined only to a few branches. Although [...]
Reducing Redundancies in the Search Space for Planning with Incomplete Information
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Planning with uncertainty in the model of the environment is a common, and difficult, problem. Typically, any differences in the past observations between two states causes the planner to plan for them as completely different states. This work is based on the fact that not all past observations are relevant to [...]
Distributed Planning for Large Teams
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In many domains, teams of hundreds of agents must cooperatively plan to perform tasks in a complex, uncertain environment. Naively, this requires that each agent take into account every teammates' state, observation, and choice of action when making decisions about its own actions. This results in a huge joint policy space [...]
Object Instance Discovery and Modeling
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: This thesis tackles the problem of automatically discovering and modeling objects from a collection of images from the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) environment. I propose an approach that can discover object instances under severe clutter, occlusion, changes of view point, heterogeneity of object appearance and imperfect segmentation. The proposed approach [...]
Low-Altitude Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Currently deployed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on preplanned missions or teleoperation and do not actively incorporate information about obstacles, landing sites, wind, position uncertainty, and other aerial vehicles during online trajectory planning. Prior work has successfully addressed some problems such as obstacle avoidance at slow speeds, or landing at known [...]
Soft Robots for Safe Physical Human Interaction
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Robots that can operate in human environments in a safe and robust manner would be of tremendous benefit to society in general, due to their immense potential as assistance providers to humans. However, robots to this day have seen limited application outside of the industrial setting in environments such as homes [...]