Student Talks
Social Robot Navigation
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Mobile robots that encounter people on a regular basis must react to them in some way. While traditional robot control algorithms treat all unexpected sensor readings as objects to be avoided, we argue that robots that operate around people should react socially to those people, following the same social conventions that [...]
Margin-based Spatial and Temporal Alignment for Computer Vision Problems
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Spatial and temporal alignment are fundamental problems in computer vision that arise naturally in many real-world applications ranging from object localization and visual tracking to image categorization and activity recognition. Most alignment algorithms can be posed as an optimization problem of an energy function over a set of allowable spatial or [...]
Learning and Optimization Methods for High Level Planning
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Motion planning for complex systems such as legged robots and mobile manipulators has proven to be a difficult task due to the high dimensional configuration spaces that underly such systems, and also due to the variety of constraints which must be met at all times. One way to escape the so-called [...]
Search in the Physical World
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: This thesis examines search in the physical world, which differs significantly from the searches in the digital world that we perform every day on our computers. When searching the internet, for instance, success is a matter of informed indexing that allows the information to be retrieved quickly. In these cases, there [...]
Mechanics of Locomotion
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Animals often use gaits - cyclic changes in shape producing a net displacement - to move through their environments. In robotics, we are interested in planning motions for artificial systems that can match or exceed the locomotive capabilities of animals. A fundamental question of locomotion is "What are the characteristics of [...]
Pre-grasp interaction as a manipulation strategy for movable objects
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Many approaches to improving robotic manipulation have focused on reach-to-grasp tasks, where the arm motion and hand configuration are planned for grasping an object. In these solutions, the object placement is often considered fixed in the environment and is carefully grasped from its presented configuration. In contrast, humans often take advantage [...]
Automated Construction of Robotic Manipulation Programs
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Society is becoming more automated with robots beginning to perform most tasks in factories and starting to help out in home and office environments. Arguably, one of the most important functions of robots is the ability to manipulate objects in their environment to accomplish primitive tasks. Because the space of possible [...]
Assembly Planning in Constrained Environments: Building Structures with Multiple Mobile Robots
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Assembly is a task at which robots excel, but only as long as they operate in well-controlled environments such as factories or assembly lines. This thesis presents a comprehensive planning and execution framework that enables mobile manipulator robots to overcome this limitation and assemble large structures in physically challenging environments. In [...]
Learning Preference Models for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Complex Domains
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Achieving robust and reliable autonomous operation even in complex unstructured environments is a central goal of field robotics. As the environments and scenarios to which robots are applied have continued to grow in complexity, so has the challenge of properly defining preferences and tradeoffs between various actions and the terrains they [...]