PhD Thesis Defense

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: This thesis is about a design process for creating educationally relevant tools. I submit that the key to creating tools that are educationally relevant is to focus on ensuring a high degree of alignment between the designed tool and the broader educational context into which the tool will be integrated. The [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Unsupervised learning techniques discover organizational structure in data, but to do so they must approach the problem with a priori assumptions. A fundamental trend in the development of these techniques has been the relaxation or elimination of the unwanted or arbitrary structural assumptions they impose. For systems that derive hidden Markov [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: When interacting with our surroundings, our actions are highly structured. This structure is a consequence of the purposefulness of human behavior --- we tend to do similar things in similar circumstances. Artificial systems must develop an understanding of the underlying dynamics that encode this structure to understand human actions in a [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Mobile robots that encounter people on a regular basis must react to them in some way. While traditional robot control algorithms treat all unexpected sensor readings as objects to be avoided, we argue that robots that operate around people should react socially to those people, following the same social conventions that [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Motion planning for complex systems such as legged robots and mobile manipulators has proven to be a difficult task due to the high dimensional configuration spaces that underly such systems, and also due to the variety of constraints which must be met at all times. One way to escape the so-called [...]

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 [...]