PhD Thesis Proposal
Online Lidar and Vision based Ego-motion Estimation and Mapping
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In many real-world applications, motion estimation and mapping must be conducted online and in real-time. The real-time motion estimates are important for controlling and maneuvering autonomous vehicles, and the maps generated online are critical for obstacle avoidance and path planning. Further, the final map can be used as a representation of [...]
The Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Augmented Reality System (OCT-MARS): a novel device for microsurgeries
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: I am proposing the development and testing of a novel augmented reality system for stereomicroscopic surgeries. This system will allow surgeons to view real-time medical image data as an in-situ overlay within the surgical field. Our application for the device is in-situ intraoperative OCT during surgeries on the anterior segment of [...]
Efficient Manipulation Task Planning via Reuse-Informed Optimization of Planning Effort
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: In order to assist humans with dangerous or menial tasks, autonomous robots will need to act under significant time and energy constraints. At task time, the amount of effort a robot spends planning directly detracts from its total performance. Manipulation tasks, however, present challenges to efficient motion planning. They are often [...]
Supervised Descent Method
Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: In this thesis, I aim to present a new perspective on looking at classical problems in Computer Vision. Instead of spending efforts on finding novel objective functions and improving existing optimization algorithms, I aim to demonstrate that formulating those problems as policy learning yields more flexible and efficient algorithms. Our recently [...]
Correcting Regions of Inaccurate Modeling for Online Performance Improvement
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: To make intelligent decisions, robots often use models of the effects of their actions on the world. Unfortunately, in complex environments, it is often infeasible to create models that are accurate in every plausible situation, which can lead to suboptimal performance. In these cases, online correction of model inaccuracies can lead [...]
Forecasting Human Motion in Social Situations
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to further our understanding of nonverbal communication by developing methods and representations to quantify and predict human body motion during social interactions. We design a data collection protocol and capture system to obtain 3D body pose and facial annotations for groups of interacting people engaged [...]
Modeling Closed-Loop Adaptive Systems
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are a powerful class of assistive devices that may one day restore movement ability to paralyzed individuals. These devices act by creating a direct mapping between recorded neural activity and the movement of an external actuator, like a computer cursor or a robotic arm, bypassing defective neural transmission [...]
Robust Manipulation via Contact Sensing
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Humans effortlessly manipulate objects in cluttered and uncertain environments. In contrast, most robotic manipulators are limited to carefully engineered environments, e.g. factories, to circumvent the difficulty of manipulation under uncertainty. Contact sensors can provide robots with with the feedback vital to addressing this limitation. However, there are three principal challenges to [...]
Efficiently Sampling from Underlying Physical Models
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Robots today have the capability to collect terabytes of data about their environment and travel kilometers in a single day, yet they are still constrained by one fundamental resource: time. Time limits the number of samples a robot can collect, sites it can analyze, and data it can return for review, [...]
Articulated 3D SLAM
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Consider a robot arm with a hand-mounted sensor. In order to interact with and understand the world, the robot must be able to reconstruct it using its sensor by moving its joints to scan the scene. If the robot's kinematics are known with absolute certainty, the problem is the simple 3D mapping problem. [...]