PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: For robots to be useful in our homes they must be able to interact with our everyday environments and obey constraints on their motion. This thesis focuses on manipulation planning algorithms, which use search and optimization to quickly compute trajectories that allow a robot to interact with its environment. Planning for [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Water drops are present throughout our daily lives. Because of their shape and refractive properties, water drops exhibit a wide variety of visual effects. If not directly illuminated by a light source, then they are difficult to see. But if they are directly illuminated, they can become the brightest objects in [...]

Event Location: GHC 6115Abstract: Humanoid robots represent the state of the art in complex robot systems, but the design of controllers can be challenging and tedious. High performance controllers that can handle unknown perturbations will be required if complex robots are to one day interact safely with people in everyday environments. The high degree of [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: In numerous real world applications, from sensor networks to computer vision to natural text processing, one needs to reason about the system in question in the face of uncertainty. A key problem in all those settings is to compute the probability distribution over the variables of interest (the query) given the [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Robotic motion planning aspires to match the ease and efficiency with which humans move through and interact with their environment. Yet state of the art robotic planners fall short of human abilities; they are slower in computation, and the results are often of lower quality. One stumbling block in traditional motion [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Autonomous robots are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry, space exploration, and even domestic applications. These diverse fields share the need for robots to perform increasingly complex motion behaviors for interacting with the world. As the robots' tasks become more varied and sophisticated, though, the challenge of programming them becomes more difficult [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Many problems considered in optimization and artificial intelligence research are static: information about the problem is known a priori, and little to no uncertainty about this information is presumed to exist. Most real problems, however, are dynamic: information about the problem is released over time, uncertain events may occur, or the [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Tasks such as street mapping and security surveillance seek a route that traverses a given space to perform a function. These task functions may involve mapping the space for accurate modeling, sensing the space for unusual activity, or searching the space for objects. When these tasks are performed autonomously by robots, [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis describes a brain-computer interface (BCI) system that was developed to allow direct cortical control of 7 active degrees of freedom in a robotic arm. Two monkeys with chronic microelectrode implants in their motor cortices were able to use the arm to complete an oriented grasping task under brain control. [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: For decades, humans have dreamed of making cars that could drive themselves, so that travel would be less taxing, and the roads safer for everyone. Toward this goal, we have made strides in motion planning algorithms for autonomous cars, using a powerful new computing tool, the parallel graphics processing unit (GPU). [...]