PhD Thesis Defense

Abstract: In the wake of a natural disaster, locating and extracting victims quickly is critical because mortality rises rapidly after the first forty-eight hours. In order to assist search and rescue teams and improve response times, teams of aerial robots equipped with sensors and cameras can engage in sensing tasks such as mapping buildings, assessing [...]

Abstract: Despite substantial technological progress that has driven the proliferation of robots across various industries and aspects of our lives, the lack of a decisive breakthrough in energy storage capabilities has restrained this trend, particularly with respect to mobile robots designed for use in unstructured and unknown field environments. The fact that these domains are [...]

Abstract: We, humans, can easily observe, explore, and analyze the world we live in. We, however, struggle to share our observation, exploration, and analysis with others. This thesis introduce Computational Studio, computational machinery that can understand, explore, and create the four-dimensional audio-visual world. This allows: (1) humans to communicate with other humans without any loss [...]

Abstract: Traffic congestion is a widespread problem throughout global metropolitan areas. In this thesis, we consider methods to optimize the performance of traffic signals to reduce congestion. We begin by presenting Expressive Real-time Intersection Scheduling (ERIS), a schedule-driven intersection control strategy that runs independently on each intersection in a traffic network. For each intersection, ERIS [...]

Abstract: Human manipulation skills are filled with creative use of physical contacts to move the object about the hand and in the environment. However, it is difficult for robot manipulators to enjoy this dexterity since contacts may cause the manipulation task to fail by introducing huge forces or unexpected change of constraints, especially when modeling [...]

Abstract: Computer vision today excels at recognizing narrow slices of the real world: our models seem to accurately detect objects like cats, cars, or chairs in benchmark datasets. However, deploying models requires that they work in the open world, which includes arbitrary objects in diverse settings. Current methods struggle on both axes: they recognize only [...]

Abstract: The central theme in robotic manipulation is that of the robot interacting with the world through physical contact. We tend to describe that physical contact using specific words that capture the nature of the contact and the action, such as grasp, roll, pivot, push, pull, tilt, close, open etc. We refer to these situation-specific [...]

Abstract: Humans learn to develop strong senses for 3D geometry by looking around in the visual world. Through pure visual perception, not only can we recover a mental 3D representation of what we are looking at, but meanwhile we can also recognize where we are looking at the scene from. Finding the 3D scene representation [...]

Abstract: Aerial cinematography is revolutionizing industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints such as entertainment, sports, and security. Fundamentally, it is a tool with immense potential to improve human creativity, expressiveness, and sharing of experiences. However, safely piloting a drone while filming a moving target in the presence of obstacles is immensely taxing, often [...]

Abstract: There are many problems in real life that involve collecting and aggregating evaluation from people, such as hiring, peer grading and conference peer review. In this thesis, we focus on three sources of biases that arise in such problems, and propose methods to mitigate them. First, we study human bias, that is, the bias [...]