PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Humans effortlessly manipulate objects in cluttered and uncertain environments. In contrast, most robotic manipulators are limited to carefully engineered environments to circumvent the difficulty of manipulation under uncertainty. Contact sensors can provide robots with with the feedback vital to addressing this limitation. This thesis proposes a framework for using feedback from [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: We describe the development and testing of the Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Augmented Reality System (OCT-MARS). This system allows surgeons to view real-time medical image data as an in-situ overlay within the surgical field. There are a number of clinical applications for which real time, in situ visualization of otherwise transparent [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: As we work to move robots out of factories and into human environments, we must empower robots to interact freely in unstructured, cluttered spaces. Humans do this easily, using diverse, whole-arm, nonprehensile actions such as pushing or pulling in everyday tasks. These interaction strategies make difficult tasks easier and impossible tasks [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: The capability and mobility of exploration robots is increasing rapidly, yet missions will always be constrained by one main resource: time. Time limits the number of samples a robot can collect, sites it can analyze, and the availability of human oversight, so it is imperative the robot is able to make [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This work describes methods for advancing the state of the art in mobile robot navigation and physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). An enabling technology in this effort is the ballbot, a person-sized mobile robot that balances on a ball. This underactuated robot presents unique challenges in planning, navigation, and control; however, it [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Air quality has long been a major health concern for citizens around the world, and increased levels of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been definitively linked to serious health effects such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and increased mortality. PM2.5 is one of six attainment criteria pollutants used by [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: An iterative model-based method is proposed for improving linguistic structure, segmentation, and prosodic annotations that correspond to the delivery of each utterance as regularized across the data. For each iteration, the training utterances are resynthized according to the existing symbolic annotation. Values of various features and subgraph structures are "twiddled:" each [...]

Tomas Simon Carnegie Mellon University Abstract This thesis develops methods for social signal reconstruction---in particular, we measure human motion during social interactions. Compared to other work in this space, we aim to measure the entire body, from the overall body pose to subtle hand gestures and facial expressions. The key to achieving this without placing [...]