PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Achieving robust and reliable autonomous operation even in complex unstructured environments is a central goal of field robotics. As the environments and scenarios to which robots are applied have continued to grow in complexity, so has the challenge of properly defining preferences and tradeoffs between various actions and the terrains they [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: As robotic systems become larger and more complex, it is increasingly important to compose them from reusable software components that can be easily deployed in novel systems. To date, efforts in this area have focused on device abstractions and messaging frameworks that promote the rapid and interoperable development of various perception, [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: This thesis examines reasoning under uncertainty in distributed systems. Unlike in centralized systems, where the observations reside in a single location, the observations in distributed systems are often scattered across the network. To reason accurately, a networked device often needs to incorporate observations from other nodes and must do so with [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Many mobile robot applications require robots to act safely and intelligently in complex unfamiliar environments with little structure and limited or unavailable human supervision. As a robot is forced to operate in an environment that it was not engineered or trained for, various aspects of its performance will inevitably degrade. Roboticists [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Light interacts with the world around us in complex ways. These interactions can broadly be classified as direct illumination - when a scene point is illuminated directly by the light source, or indirect illumination - when a scene point receives light that is reflected, refracted or scattered off other scene elements. [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This thesis explores the topic of geolocation with range. A robust method for localization and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is proposed. This method uses a polar parameterization of the state to achieve accurate estimates of the nonlinear and multi-modal distributions in range-only systems. Several experimental evaluations on real robots reveal [...]

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Sanjiv Singh is a Research Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He received his B.S in Computer Science from the University of Denver (1983) M.S in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University (1985) and a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon (1995). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Dynamics in locomotion is highly useful, as can be seen in animals and is becoming apparent in robots. For instance, chimpanzees are dynamic climbers that can reach virtually any part of a tree and even move to neighboring trees, while sloths are quasistatic climbers confined only to a few branches. Although [...]

Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Currently deployed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on preplanned missions or teleoperation and do not actively incorporate information about obstacles, landing sites, wind, position uncertainty, and other aerial vehicles during online trajectory planning. Prior work has successfully addressed some problems such as obstacle avoidance at slow speeds, or landing at known [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: The appearance of an outdoor scene is determined to a great extent by the prevailing illumination conditions. However, most practical computer vision applications treat illumination more as a nuisance rather than a source of signal. In this dissertation, we suggest that we should instead embrace illumination, even in the challenging, uncontrolled [...]