PhD Thesis Defense

Abstract: Robotic simulation, planning, estimation, and control, have all been built on top of numerical optimization. In this same time, modern convex optimization has matured into a robust technology delivering globally optimal solutions in polynomial time. With advances in differentiable optimization and custom solvers capable of producing smooth derivatives, convex modeling has become fast, reliable, [...]

Abstract: Robotics researchers have been attempting to extend data-driven breakthroughs in fields like computer vision and language processing into robot learning. However, unlike vision or language domains where massive amounts of data is readily available on the internet, training robotic policies relies on physical and interactive data collected via interacting with the physical world -- [...]