Student Talks
Expressive Motion for Low Degree-of-Freedom Robots
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: As social and collaborative robots move into everyday life, the need for algorithms enabling their acceptance becomes critical. People parse non-verbal communications intuitively, even from machines that do not look like people, thus, expressive motion is a natural and efficient way to communicate with people. This work presents a computational Expressive [...]
Algorithms, Implementation, and Studies on Eating with a Shared Control Robot Arm
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: People with upper extremity disabilities are gaining increased independence through the use of assisted devices such as wheelchair-mounted robotic arms. However, the increased capability and dexterity of these robotic arms also makes them challenging to control through accessible interfaces like joysticks, sip-and-puff, and buttons that are lower-dimensional than the control space [...]
Completing Manipulation Tasks Efficiently in Complex Environments
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: An effective autonomous robot performing dangerous or menial tasks will need to act under significant time and energy constraints. At task time, the amount of effort a robot spends planning its motion directly detracts from its total performance. Manipulation tasks, however, present challenges to efficient motion planning. Tightly coupled steps (e.g. [...]
Decision-Theoretic User Modeling for Human-Robot Mutual Adaptation
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: In many application domains, robots co-exist in the same physical space with humans and aim to become trustworthy partners. We particularly envision personal robots arranging furniture with a human partner, manufacturing robots performing spar assembly with human co-workers, or rehabilitation robots assisting spinal cord injury patients. In such collaborative settings, humans [...]
Data-Driven Statistical Models of Robotic Manipulation
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Improving robotic manipulation is critical for robots to be actively useful in real-world factories and homes. While some success has been shown in simulation and controlled environments, robots are slow, clumsy, and not general or robust enough when interacting with their environment. By contrast, humans effortlessly manipulate objects. One possible reason [...]
Robust Manipulation via Contact Sensing
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Humans effortlessly manipulate objects in cluttered and uncertain environments. In contrast, most robotic manipulators are limited to carefully engineered environments to circumvent the difficulty of manipulation under uncertainty. Contact sensors can provide robots with with the feedback vital to addressing this limitation. This thesis proposes a framework for using feedback from [...]
The Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Augmented Reality System (OCT-MARS): a novel device for microsurgeries
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: We describe the development and testing of the Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Augmented Reality System (OCT-MARS). This system allows surgeons to view real-time medical image data as an in-situ overlay within the surgical field. There are a number of clinical applications for which real time, in situ visualization of otherwise transparent [...]
Training Strategies for Time Series: Learning for Filtering and Reinforcement Learning
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Data driven approaches to modeling time-series are important in a variety of applications from market prediction in economics to the simulation of robotic systems. However, traditional supervised machine learning techniques designed for i.i.d. data often perform poorly on these sequential problems. This thesis proposes that time series and sequential prediction, whether [...]
Robust Rearrangement Planning using Nonprehensile Interaction
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: As we work to move robots out of factories and into human environments, we must empower robots to interact freely in unstructured, cluttered spaces. Humans do this easily, using diverse, whole-arm, nonprehensile actions such as pushing or pulling in everyday tasks. These interaction strategies make difficult tasks easier and impossible tasks [...]
Deliberative Perception
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: A recurrent and elementary machine perception task is to localize objects of interest in the physical world, be it objects on a warehouse shelf or cars on a road. In many real-world examples, this task entails localizing specific object instances with known 3D models. For example, a warehouse robot equipped with [...]