PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Robots have become increasingly adept at performing a wide variety of tasks in the world. However, many of these tasks can benefit tremendously from having more than a single robot simultaneously working on the problem. Multiple robots can aid in a search and rescue mission each scouting a subsection of the [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: We expect legged robots to be highly mobile. Human walking and running can execute quick changes in speed and direction, even on non-flat ground. Indeed, analysis of simplified models shows that these quantities can be tightly controlled by adjusting the leg placement between steps and that the leg placement can also [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Mobile autonomous service robots perform services requested by users at specific times. The goal of this thesis is to explore how a service robot can make use of the spare time between user requests. We propose the robot performs self-scheduled services for which it receives reward from the users. Our proposed [...]