PhD Thesis Defense

Abstract:  Intelligent vehicles have been proposed as one path to increasing traffic safety and reducing on-road crashes. Driving “intelligence” today takes many forms, ranging from simple blind spot occupancy or forward collision warnings to distance-aware cruise and all the way to full driving autonomy in certain situations. Primarily, these methods are outward-facing and operate on [...]

Abstract:  This thesis aims to build computer systems to understand everyday hand-object interactions in the physical world – both perceiving ongoing interactions in 3D space and predicting possible interactions. This ability is crucial for applications such as virtual reality, robotic manipulations, and augmented reality. The problem is inherently ill-posed due to the challenges of one-to-many [...]

Abstract: The role of sensing is widely acknowledged for robots interacting with the physical environment. However, few contemporary sensors have gained widespread use among roboticists. This thesis proposes a framework for incorporating sensors into a robot learning paradigm, from development to deployment, through the lens of ReSkin -- a versatile and scalable magnetic tactile sensor. [...]

Abstract: Humans are remarkably adept at learning to perform tasks by imitating other people demonstrating these tasks. Key to this is our ability to reason abstractly about the high-level strategy of the task at hand (such as the recipe of cooking a dish) and the behaviours needed to solve this task (such as the behaviour [...]