PhD Thesis Defense

Archived Zoom Video Abstract Water ice at the lunar poles could be the most valuable resource beyond planet Earth. However, that value is not foregone, and can only be determined by rovers that evaluate the distributions of abundance, concentration, and characteristics of this ice. The near-term explorations will be solar and unlikely to endure night, [...]

Zoom Link Accurate and reliable state estimation is essential for safe mobile robot operation in real-world environments because ego-motion estimates are required by many critical autonomy functions such as control, planning, and mapping. Computing accurate state estimates depends on the physical characteristics of the environment, the selection of suitable sensors to capture that information, and [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: The desire to operate robots in unstructured environments, side-by-side with humans, has created a demand for safe and robust sensing skins. Largely inspired by human skin, the ultimate goal of electronic skins is to measure diverse sensory information, conform to surfaces, and avoid interfering with the natural mechanics of the host or [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: 3D sensing with portable imaging systems is becoming more and more popular in computer vision applications such as autonomous driving, virtual reality, robotics manipulation and surveillance, due to the decreasing expense and size of RGB cameras. Despite the compactness and portability of the small baseline vision systems, it is well-known that the [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: Computer vision has a great potential to help our daily lives by searching for lost keys, watering flowers or reminding us to take a pill. To succeed with such tasks, computer vision methods need to be trained from real and diverse examples of our daily dynamic scenes. First, we need to give [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: Robots have the tremendous potential of assisting people in their lives, allowing them to achieve goals that they would not be able to achieve by themselves. In particular, socially assistive robots provide assistance primarily through social interaction, in healthcare, therapy, and education contexts. Despite their potential, current socially assistive robots still lack [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: A long standing goal of robotics research is to create algorithms that can automatically learn complex control strategies from scratch. Part of the challenge of applying such algorithms to robots is the choice of representation. Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to many different robotic tasks such as the Ball-in-a-Cup [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: Robotic navigation algorithms for real-world robots require dense and accurate probabilistic volumetric representations of the environment in order to traverse efficiently. Sensor data in a Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM) context, however, always has associated acquisition noise and pose uncertainty, and encoding this within the map representation while still maintaining computational tractability [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: In recent years, researchers in SysML have created algorithms and systems that parallelize ML training over multiple devices or computational nodes. As ML models become more structurally complex, many systems have struggled to provide all-round performance on a variety of models. Particularly, ML scale-up is usually underestimated in terms of the amount [...]

Zoom Link Abstract: Humans can effortlessly grasp a wide variety of objects in diverse environments. On the other hand, robotic grasping has been extremely challenging in practice and is far from matching human dexterity. Despite recent progress in the community, most research is still largely focused on constrained environments like picking individual objects on a [...]