PhD Thesis Defense
Toward an Automated System for the Analysis of Cell Behavior: Cellular Event Detection and Cell Tracking in Time-lapse Live Cell Microscopy
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Time-lapse live cell imaging has been increasingly employed by biological and biomedical researchers to understand the underlying mechanisms in cell physiology and development by investigating behavior of cells. This trend has led to a huge amount of image data, the analysis of which becomes a bottleneck in related research. Consequently, how [...]
Cross-cultural believability of robot characters
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Believability of characters is an objective in literature, theater, animation, film, and other media. Virtual characters, believable as sharing their ethnic background with users, improve their perception of the character and, sometimes, even their task performance. Social scientists refer to this phenomenon as homophily---humans tend to associate and bond with similar [...]
Lightweight Robotic Excavation
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 [...]
The Design of Control Architectures for Force-controlled Humanoids Performing Dynamic Tasks
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, [...]
Interactive Learning for Sequential Decisions and Predictions
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 [...]
Inference Machines: Parsing Scenes via Iterated Predictions
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 [...]
Detecting Object Instances Without Discriminative Features
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 [...]
Physics-Based Manipulation Planning in Cluttered Human Environments
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 [...]
Representation, Planning, and Learning of Dynamic Ad Hoc Robot Teams
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 [...]
Data-Driven Geometric Scene Understanding
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 [...]