Student Talks
Lumenhancement: Exploiting Appearance for Planetary Modeling
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Planetary environments are among the most hazardous, remote and uncharted in the solar system. They are also critical to the search for life, human exploration, resource extraction, infrastructure and science. These applications represent the prime unexploited opportunity for automated modeling, but robots are under-utilized for this purpose. There is urgent need [...]
Attention-guided Algorithms to Retarget and Augment Animations, Stills, and Videos
Event Location: GHC 4301Abstract: Still pictures, animations and videos are used by artists to tell stories visually. Computer graphics algorithms create visual stories too, either automatically, or by assisting artists. Why is it so hard to build algorithms that can manipulate the content created by a visual artist? A primary reason is that artists introspect [...]
Robust Force-Controlled Walking on the Sarcos Humanoid Robot
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: obust to both external disturbances and modeling error. We describe a walking controller that functions by coordinating multiple low-dimensional optimal controllers. We break a simplified model of the dynamics into several subsystems that have limited interaction. Each of the subsystems are augmented with coordination variables and we use a Dynamic Programming [...]
Shape for Contact
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: End effectors play a privileged role in the manipulation chain. They contact the world. That role gives them an advantageous position to convey function and contribute to a solution to the manipulation problem. This thesis proposal explores the problem of designing the shape of a rigid end effector to perform a [...]
Looking Beyond Shape for Instance Recognition of Weakly-Textured Objects
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Object instance detection is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision and has been extensively studied in the past. From a single image, the goal is to detect a specific object from an arbitrary viewpoint in a cluttered environment. While the use of discriminative point-based features such as SIFT works well for [...]
Modeling and Estimating Non-rigid Image Deformation
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Non-rigid deformations of surfaces and volumes result in complex distortions in images. Modeling deformation can help better understand such real-world phenomena and extract useful information about the scenes. This is closely related to many core vision tasks, such as image alignment, matching, tracking, detection and recognition. Modeling deformation remains challenging because [...]
Distributed Algorithms for Constrained Multi-robot Dynamic Task Assignment with Formal Performance Guarantees
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: 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, search and rescue, disaster response, extraterrestrial exploration, sensing data collection [...]
Fast and Graceful Balancing Mobile Robots
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Personal mobile robots will soon be operating and closely interacting with us in human environments. Balancing mobile robots can be effective personal robots as they can be tall enough for eye-level interaction and narrow enough to navigate cluttered environments, and they also have the dynamic capabilities to move with speed and [...]
Distributed Planning Under Uncertainty for Large Teams
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In many domains, teams of hundreds of agents must cooperatively plan to perform tasks in a complex, uncertain environment. This requires that each agent take into account teammates' states, observations, and actions when making decisions about its own actions. Naively, finding a good policy involves searching this large joint space, but [...]
Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many existing and promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-millimeter scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain higher positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument removes tremor and [...]