PhD Thesis Proposal
Mapping & Localizing on the Beating Heart
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In the United States the annual cost of cardiovascular disease exceeds $475 billion. Medical imaging costs more than $100 billion annually, with cardiovascular imaging representing almost one-third. Any approach that can reduce the need for imaging in cardiovascular care has the potential to provide significant savings. Without direct visualization of the [...]
Experience Graphs: Leveraging Experience in Planning
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Motion planning is a central problem in robotics and is crucial to finding paths to navigate and manipulate safely and efficiently. Ideally, we want planners which find paths quickly and of good quality. Additionally, planners should generate predictable motions, which are safer when operating in the presence of humans. While the [...]
Subdimensional Expansion: An Approach to Computationally Tractable Multirobot Path Planning
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Planning optimal paths for large numbers of robots is computationally expensive. In our research, we developed a new framework for multirobot path planning called subdimensional expansion, which initially plans for each robot individually, and then coordinates motion among the robots as needed. More specifically, subdimensional expansion initially creates a one-dimensional search [...]
Multiple Prediction Learning: Learning to Optimize Sequences via Submodular Maximization
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Increasingly, real world problems require multiple predictions. For instance in advertisement placement on the web, a list of advertisements is placed on a page with the objective of maximizing click- through rate. Traditionally machine learning has focused on producing a single best prediction. More generally, in this thesis, we build an [...]
Pose Inference Machines: Efficient and Accurate Human Pose Estimation from Images
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Fast and accurate human pose estimation enables a wide spectrum of applications from interactive control, markerless motion capture and gesture recognition to providing rich semantic information for higher level vision tasks such as scene understanding. The goal of this work is to develop an accurate and real-time human pose estimation system [...]
Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robot-assisted surgery has been increasingly adopted in a wide variety of surgical applications because it offers fine manipulation with high precision and dexterity. Despite the commercial success of robotic platforms, practical use in microsurgery is still challenging due to a considerable level of accuracy required at sub-millimeter scales. Limited visualization and [...]
State Estimation for Humanoid Robots
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: This proposal focuses on dynamic model based state estimation for hydraulic humanoid robots. The goal is to produce state estimates that are robust and achieve good performance when combined with the controller. Three issues are addressed in this proposal. 1. How to handle modelling error using state estimation? 2. How to [...]
Bayesian Aggregation of Evidence for Detection and Characterization of Patterns in Multiple Noisy Observations
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Effective use of Machine Learning to support extracting maximal information from limited sensor data is one of the important research challenges in robotic sensing. This thesis develops techniques for detecting and characterizing patterns in noisy sensor data. Our Bayesian Aggregation (BA) algorithmic framework can leverage data fusion from multiple low Signal-To-Noise [...]
Factoring Scenes into 3D Structure an Style
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Given a single image of a scene, humans have few issues answering questions about the 3D structure like “is this facing upwards?” even though mathematically speaking this should be impossible. We have similarly have few issues accounting for this 3D structure in answering viewpoint independent questions like “is this the same [...]