PhD Thesis Proposal

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Facial actions speak louder than words. Facial actions can reveal a person's emotion, intention, and physical state; and make possible a range of applications that include market research, human-robot interaction, drowsiness detection, and clinical and developmental psychology research. In this proposal, we investigate both supervised and unsupervised approaches to facial action [...]

Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: The last decade has seen remarkable advances in 3D perception for robotics. Advances in range sensing and SLAM now allow robots to easily acquire detailed 3D maps of their environment in real-time. However, adaptive robot behavior requires an understanding the environment that goes beyond pure geometry. A step above purely geometric [...]

Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: Loose, granular terrain can cause rovers to slip and sink, inhibiting mobility and sometimes even permanently entrapping a vehicle. Traversability of granular terrain is difficult to foresee using traditional, non-contact sensing methods, such as cameras and LIDAR. This inability to detect loose terrain hazards has caused significant delays for rovers on [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Perception and state estimation are critical robot competencies that remain difficult to harden and generalize. This is due in part to the incredible complexity of modern perception systems which are commonly comprised of dozens of components with hundreds of parameters overall. Selecting a configuration of parameters relies on a human's understanding [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: As autonomous systems are deployed in increasingly complex and uncertain environments, safe, accurate, and robust feedback control techniques are required to ensure reliable operation. Accurate trajectory tracking is essential to complete a variety of tasks, but this may be difficult if the system’s dynamics change online, e.g., due to environmental effects [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: People with upper extremity disabilities are gaining increased independence through the use of assisted devices such as wheelchair-mounted robotic arms. However, the increased capability and dexterity of these robotic arms also makes them challenging to control through accessible interfaces like joysticks, sip-and-puff, and buttons that are lower-dimensional than the control space [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: In many application domains, robots co-exist in the same physical space with humans and aim to become trustworthy partners. We particularly envision personal robots arranging furniture with a human partner, manufacturing robots performing spar assembly with human co-workers, or rehabilitation robots assisting spinal cord injury patients. In such collaborative settings, humans [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Improving robotic manipulation is critical for robots to be actively useful in real-world factories and homes. While some success has been shown in simulation and controlled environments, robots are slow, clumsy, and not general or robust enough when interacting with their environment. By contrast, humans effortlessly manipulate objects. One possible reason [...]

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Data driven approaches to modeling time-series are important in a variety of applications from market prediction in economics to the simulation of robotic systems. However, traditional supervised machine learning techniques designed for i.i.d. data often perform poorly on these sequential problems. This thesis proposes that time series and sequential prediction, whether [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: A recurrent and elementary machine perception task is to localize objects of interest in the physical world, be it objects on a warehouse shelf or cars on a road. In many real-world examples, this task entails localizing specific object instances with known 3D models. For example, a warehouse robot equipped with [...]