Student Talks
Adaptive Model-Predictive Motion Planning for Navigation in Complex Environments
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Outdoor mobile robot motion planning and navigation is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence. The search space density and dimensionality, system dynamics and environmental interaction complexity, and the perceptual horizon limitation all contribute to the difficultly of this problem. It is hard to generate a motion plan between arbitrary [...]
Modeling Illumination for Scene Recovery through the Motion, Occlusion and Strobing of Light-Sources
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Recent display applications for entertainment and business have made available new types of illumination using LEDs, DMDs and LCDs, which are bright, energy efficient and cheap. Some of these devices are programmable and allow spatio-temporal control of the emitted light rays. With the advent of such digital light-sources, illumination [...]
Multi-robot Coordination in Domains with Intra-path Constraints
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Many applications require teams of robots to cooperatively execute tasks. Among these domains are those in which successful coordination must respect intra-path constraints, which are constraints that occur on the paths of agents and affect route planning. One such domain is disaster response with intra-path constraints, a compelling application [...]
Learning in Modular Systems
Low-Altitude Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1109Abstract: Currently deployed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on preplanned missions or teleoperation and do not actively incorporate information about obstacles, landing sites, wind, position uncertainty, and other aerial vehicles during online trajectory planning. However, to enable autonomous missions in cluttered environments it is necessary to react to all available [...]
Robust Monocular Vision-based Navigation for a Miniature Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1109Abstract: Recently the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has expanded from military to civilian applications. Contrary to remote-controlled tasks in a high altitude, low-altitude flight in an urban environment requires a higher level of autonomy to respond to complex and unpredictable situations. Vision-based methods for autonomous navigation have been [...]
Modeling and Controlling Light Transport for Scene Recovery and Rendering
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Global illumination effects, such as inter-reflections, sub-surface scattering and volumetric scattering form an integral part of our daily visual experience. In fact, it is almost impossible to find a real world scene without any global illumination. Unfortunately, however, due to its complex nature, it is hard to build tractable [...]
Cortical Prosthetic Control of an Artificial Arm, Wrist, and Hand
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 3305Abstract: In a recent demonstration, a monkey was able to feed itself with a robot arm it controlled through a cortical brain-computer interface (BCI) [1]. This work extended past brain control based on 3-D target acquisition alone to add the control of grip aperture. We now extend this further to [...]
Constrained Manipulation Planning
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Abstract: Every planning problem in robotics involves constraints. Whether the robot must avoid collision or joint limits, there are always states that are not permissible. Some constraints are straightforward to satisfy while others can be so stringent that the allowed states are very difficult to identify. What makes constrained planning [...]
Planning to Fail: Incorporating Reliability into Design and Mission Planning for Mobile Robots
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Current mobile robots generally fall into one of two categories as far as reliability is concerned -- highly unreliable, or very expensive. Most fall into the first category, requiring teams of graduate students or staff engineers to coddle them in the days and hours before a brief demonstration. The [...]