PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Planetary excavators face unique and extreme engineering constraints relative to terrestrial counterparts. In space missions mass is always at a premium because it is the main driver behind launch costs. Lightweight operation, due to low mass and reduced gravity, hinders excavation and mobility by reducing the forces a robot can effect [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This talk is about improving the process of designing controllers for humanoid robots. It describes tools we designed that enable us to iterate faster when experimenting with control systems that aggregate multiple model based sub-controllers. Many model based humanoid controllers can be considered approximations to a fully general, but computationally intractable, [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Sequential prediction problems arise commonly in many areas of robotics and information processing: e.g., predicting a sequence of actions over time to achieve a goal in a control task, interpreting an image through a sequence of local image patch classifications, or translating speech to text through an iterative decoding procedure. Learning [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Extracting a rich representation of an environment from visual sensor readings can benefit many tasks in robotics, e.g., path planning, mapping, and object manipulation. While important progress has been made, it remains a difficult problem to effectively parse entire scenes, i.e., to recognize semantic objects, man-made structures, and landforms. This process [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In this thesis, we study the topic of detecting object instances which lack discriminative features in scenes with severe clutter and occlusions. Our work focuses on the three key areas: (1) objects that have ambiguous features, (2) objects where discriminative point-based features cannot be reliably extracted, and (3) occlusions. Current approaches [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis presents a series of planners and algorithms for manipulation in cluttered human environments. The focus is on using physics-based predictions, particularly for pushing operations, as an effective way to address the manipulation challenges posed by these environments.  We introduce push-grasping, a physics-based action to grasp an object first by pushing it and [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Forming an effective multi-robot team to perform a task is a key problem in many domains. The performance of a multi-robot team depends on the robots the team is composed of, where each robot has different capabilities. Team performance has previously been modeled as the sum of single-robot capabilities, and these [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In this thesis, we describe a data-driven approach to leverage repositories of 3D models for scene understanding. Our ability to relate what we see in an image to a large collection of 3D models allows us to transfer information from these models, creating a rich understanding of the scene.  We develop [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Given a desired function for an effector, what is its appropriate shape? This thesis addresses the problem of designing the shape of a rigid end effector to perform a given manipulation task. It presents three main contributions: First, it describes the kinematics of an effector as the combination of both its [...]