PhD Thesis Defense

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 [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Many domains, such as emergency assistance, agriculture, construction, and planetary exploration, will increasingly require effective coordination of teams of robots and humans to accomplish a collection of spatially distributed heterogeneous tasks. Such coordination problems range from those that require loosely coordinated teams in which agents independently perform their assigned tasks, to [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Machine learning algorithms have been successfully applied to learning classifiers in many domains such as computer vision, fraud detection, and brain image analysis. Typically, classifiers are trained to predict a class value given a set of labeled training data that includes all possible class values, and sometimes additional unlabeled training data. [...]

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 [...]