Student Talks
Toward Adaptation and Reuse of Advanced Robotic Algorithms
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: As robotic systems become larger and more complex, it is increasingly important to compose them from reusable software components that can be easily deployed in novel systems. To date, efforts in this area have focused on device abstractions and messaging frameworks that promote the rapid and interoperable development of various perception, [...]
A Biologically Grounded Approach to Science Autonomy
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: As we reach out to explore the universe time, distance, and danger compel us to use robotic proxies to conduct exploration missions. Limitations on or the absence of communications with our robotic explorers demand science autonomy. While exploring robots will encounter stimuli that are valuable for completing mission objectives. Robotic explorers [...]
Graphical Models and Overlay Networks for Reasoning about Large Distributed Systems
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: This thesis examines reasoning under uncertainty in distributed systems. Unlike in centralized systems, where the observations reside in a single location, the observations in distributed systems are often scattered across the network. To reason accurately, a networked device often needs to incorporate observations from other nodes and must do so with [...]
Online Learning Techniques for Improving Robot Navigation in Unfamiliar Domains
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Many mobile robot applications require robots to act safely and intelligently in complex unfamiliar environments with little structure and limited or unavailable human supervision. As a robot is forced to operate in an environment that it was not engineered or trained for, various aspects of its performance will inevitably degrade. Roboticists [...]
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 [...]