PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]