Student Talks
From Supervised to Unsupervised Facial Action Discovery
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Facial actions speak louder than words. Facial actions can reveal a person's emotion, intention, and physical state; and make possible a range of applications that include market research, human-robot interaction, drowsiness detection, and clinical and developmental psychology research. In this proposal, we investigate both supervised and unsupervised approaches to facial action [...]
Using Planned View Trajectories to Build Good Models of Planetary Features under Transient Illumination
Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: This research addresses the modeling of substantially 3D planetary terrain features, such as skylights, canyons, craters, rocks, and mesas, by a surface robot. The sun lights planetary features with transient, directional illumination. For concave features like skylight pits, craters, and canyons, this can lead to dark shadows. For all terrain features, [...]
Semantic Mapping for Robotic Navigation and Exploration
Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: The last decade has seen remarkable advances in 3D perception for robotics. Advances in range sensing and SLAM now allow robots to easily acquire detailed 3D maps of their environment in real-time. However, adaptive robot behavior requires an understanding the environment that goes beyond pure geometry. A step above purely geometric [...]
Traversability Prediction for Planetary Rovers in Granular Terrain
Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: Loose, granular terrain can cause rovers to slip and sink, inhibiting mobility and sometimes even permanently entrapping a vehicle. Traversability of granular terrain is difficult to foresee using traditional, non-contact sensing methods, such as cameras and LIDAR. This inability to detect loose terrain hazards has caused significant delays for rovers on [...]
Tracking and Calibrating Articulated Robots using SLAM Techniques
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Robots still struggle with everyday manipulation tasks. An overriding problem with robotic manipulation is uncertainty in the robot's state and calibration parameters. Small amounts of uncertainty can lead to complete task failure. This thesis explores ways of tracking and calibrating noisy robot arms using computer vision, with an aim toward making [...]
Factoring Scenes into 3D Structure and Style
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Given a single image of a scene, humans have few issues answering questions about its 3D structure like “is this facing upwards?” even though mathematically speaking this should be impossible. We have similarly have few issues accounting for this 3D structure in answering viewpoint independent questions like ``is this the same [...]
In-Field Parameter Selection for Perception Context Adaptation
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Perception and state estimation are critical robot competencies that remain difficult to harden and generalize. This is due in part to the incredible complexity of modern perception systems which are commonly comprised of dozens of components with hundreds of parameters overall. Selecting a configuration of parameters relies on a human's understanding [...]
Direct Pose Estimation and Refinement
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: We study a fundamental question in pose estimation from vision-only video data: should the pose of a camera be determined from fixed and known correspondences? Or should correspondences be simultaneously estimated alongside the pose? Determining pose from fixed correspondences is known as feature-based, where well-established tools from projective geometry are utilized [...]
Safe, Efficient, and Robust Predictive Control of Constrained Nonlinear Systems
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: As autonomous systems are deployed in increasingly complex and uncertain environments, safe, accurate, and robust feedback control techniques are required to ensure reliable operation. Accurate trajectory tracking is essential to complete a variety of tasks, but this may be difficult if the system’s dynamics change online, e.g., due to environmental effects [...]
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 [...]