PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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. [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This work describes methods for advancing the state of the art in mobile robot navigation and physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI). An enabling technology in this effort is the ballbot, a person-sized mobile robot that balances on a ball.  This underactuated robot presents unique challenges in planning, navigation, and control; however, it also has significant advantages over [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: As we work to move robots out of factories and into human environments, we must empower robots to interact freely in unstructured, cluttered spaces.  Humans do this easily, using diverse, whole-arm, nonprehensile actions such as pushing or pulling in everyday tasks. These interaction strategies make difficult tasks easier and impossible tasks [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: In shared autonomy, user input and robot autonomy are combined to control a robot to achieve a goal. Most prior work accomplishes this by augmenting user input with some autonomous strategy for that goal. We take a different viewpoint, treating the user as a policy minimizing some cost function. Our aim [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: We propose a direct, featureless, Lucas-Kanade-based method as a reliable Visual Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (VSLAM) solution in challenging environments, where feature detection and precise subpixel localization may be unreliable. Current state-of-the-art direct methods have been shown to perform well on a range of challenging datasets. Nonetheless, they have been limited [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: The neural controls of human and animal locomotion have been studied over centuries. However, much of our knowledge about the locomotion control of complex species, especially humans, still relies on extrapolating from what is known in simpler animals. One barrier for better understanding the control of human locomotion is that we [...]