PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: This thesis examines search in the physical world, which differs significantly from the searches in the digital world that we perform every day on our computers. When searching the internet, for instance, success is a matter of informed indexing that allows the information to be retrieved quickly. In these cases, there [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Many approaches to improving robotic manipulation have focused on reach-to-grasp tasks, where the arm motion and hand configuration are planned for grasping an object. In these solutions, the object placement is often considered fixed in the environment and is carefully grasped from its presented configuration. In contrast, humans often take advantage [...]

Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Society is becoming more automated with robots beginning to perform most tasks in factories and starting to help out in home and office environments. Arguably, one of the most important functions of robots is the ability to manipulate objects in their environment to accomplish primitive tasks. Because the space of possible [...]

Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Assembly is a task at which robots excel, but only as long as they operate in well-controlled environments such as factories or assembly lines. This thesis presents a comprehensive planning and execution framework that enables mobile manipulator robots to overcome this limitation and assemble large structures in physically challenging environments. In [...]

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 [...]