Student Talks
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 [...]
Efficiently Sampling from Underlying Physical Models
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: The capability and mobility of exploration robots is increasing rapidly, yet missions will always be constrained by one main resource: time. Time limits the number of samples a robot can collect, sites it can analyze, and the availability of human oversight, so it is imperative the robot is able to make [...]
.jpg "Shomin.Michael-1.jpg")
Navigation and Physical Interaction with Balancing Robots
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This work describes methods for advancing the state of the art in mobile robot navigation and physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). An enabling technology in this effort is the ballbot, a person-sized mobile robot that balances on a ball. This underactuated robot presents unique challenges in planning, navigation, and control; however, it [...]