PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Latent variable models constitute a compact representation for complex, high dimensional data. This is useful in many applications in Robotics and Natural Language Processing (NLP).  Latent models are however very hard to learn, in part because of the non-convexity of the likelihood function. The main difficult is associated with estimating the [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Human conversations are a type of jointly focused encounter in which the participants gather together and openly cooperate to sustain a single focus of attention. When the participants are standing, their cooperation can be observed in their spatial organization. People position and orient themselves to maximize their opportunity to monitor one [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Air quality has long been a major health concern for citizens around the world, and increased levels of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been definitively linked to serious health effects such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and increased mortality.  PM2.5 is one of six attainment criteria pollutants used by [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Active illumination systems use a controllable light source and a light sensor to measure properties of a scene. For such a system to work reliably it must be able to handle the effects of global light transport, bright ambient light, defocus and scene motion. The goal of this thesis is to [...]