Student Talks
Multi-agent Pickup and Delivery Planning with Transfers
Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: In Pickup and Delivery Problems (PDPs), mobile vehicles retrieve and deliver a set of items. The PDP is a well-studied, NP-hard problem. Examples of the PDP include mail and courier services, taxis, ridesharing services, and robots such as our own CoBots and CreBots, which retrieve and deliver items for the occupants [...]
Mapping & Localizing on the Beating Heart
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In the United States the annual cost of cardiovascular disease exceeds $475 billion. Medical imaging costs more than $100 billion annually, with cardiovascular imaging representing almost one-third. Any approach that can reduce the need for imaging in cardiovascular care has the potential to provide significant savings. Without direct visualization of the [...]
Coherent Scene Understanding with 3D Geometric Reasoning
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: When looking at a single 2D image of a scene, humans could effortlessly understand the 3D world behind the scene even though stereo and motion cues are not available. Due to this remarkable human capability, one of the ultimate goals of computer vision is to enable machines to automatically infer the [...]
Experience Graphs: Leveraging Experience in Planning
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Motion planning is a central problem in robotics and is crucial to finding paths to navigate and manipulate safely and efficiently. Ideally, we want planners which find paths quickly and of good quality. Additionally, planners should generate predictable motions, which are safer when operating in the presence of humans. While the [...]
Subdimensional Expansion: An Approach to Computationally Tractable Multirobot Path Planning
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Planning optimal paths for large numbers of robots is computationally expensive. In our research, we developed a new framework for multirobot path planning called subdimensional expansion, which initially plans for each robot individually, and then coordinates motion among the robots as needed. More specifically, subdimensional expansion initially creates a one-dimensional search [...]
Distributed Algorithm Design for Constrained Multi-robot Task Assignment
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: The task assignment problem is one of the fundamental combinatorial optimization problems. It has been extensively studied in operation research, management science, computer science and robotics. In multi-robot systems (MRS), there are various applications of task assignment, such as environmental monitoring, disaster response, extraterrestrial exploration, sensing data collection and collaborative autonomous [...]
Control and Design of Snake Robots
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Snake robots are ideally suited to highly confined environments because their small cross-sections and highly redundant kinematics allow them to enter and move through tight spaces with a high degree of dexterity. Despite these theoretical advantages, snake robots also pose a number of practical challenges that have limited their usefulness in [...]
Multiple Prediction Learning: Learning to Optimize Sequences via Submodular Maximization
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Increasingly, real world problems require multiple predictions. For instance in advertisement placement on the web, a list of advertisements is placed on a page with the objective of maximizing click- through rate. Traditionally machine learning has focused on producing a single best prediction. More generally, in this thesis, we build an [...]
Pose Inference Machines: Efficient and Accurate Human Pose Estimation from Images
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Fast and accurate human pose estimation enables a wide spectrum of applications from interactive control, markerless motion capture and gesture recognition to providing rich semantic information for higher level vision tasks such as scene understanding. The goal of this work is to develop an accurate and real-time human pose estimation system [...]
Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robot-assisted surgery has been increasingly adopted in a wide variety of surgical applications because it offers fine manipulation with high precision and dexterity. Despite the commercial success of robotic platforms, practical use in microsurgery is still challenging due to a considerable level of accuracy required at sub-millimeter scales. Limited visualization and [...]