PhD Thesis Defense

Abstract: Optimal Control is a popular formulation for designing controllers for dynamic robotic systems. Under the formulation, the desired long-term behavior of the system is encoded via a cost function and the policy, i.e. a mapping from the state of the system to control commands, to achieve the desired behavior are obtained by solving an [...]

Abstract: Image denoising, depth completion, scene flow, and dynamic 3D reconstruction are all examples of recovery problems: the estimation of multidimensional signals from corrupted or partial measurements. This thesis examines these problems from the classic analysis-by-synthesis perspective, where a signal model is used to propose hypotheses, which are then compared to observations. This paradigm has [...]

Abstract: Touch is an essential sensing modality for making autonomous robots more dexterous and allowing them to work collaboratively with humans. In particular, the advent of vision-based tactile sensors has resulted in efforts to design them for different robotic manipulation tasks. However, this design task remains a challenging problem. This is for two reasons: first, [...]