PhD Thesis Proposal

Abstract: Retinal surgery procedures require surgeons to manipulate very delicate tissues with little room for error. During epiretinal membrane surgery, to reduce chances of recurrence, surgeons may have to remove the 10 µm thick internal limiting membrane from the retinal surface. An experimental procedure to treat retinal vein occlusion is retinal vein cannulation. During this [...]

Abstract: State estimation is a fundamental component of embodied perception. Contemporary autonomous vehicle (AV) benchmarks have advanced techniques for training 3D detectors, particularly on large-scale data. Notably, although prior work has nearly solved 3D object detection for a few common classes (e.g., pedestrian and car), detecting many rare classes in-the-tail (e.g., debris and stroller) remains [...]

Abstract: Robotic simulation, planning, estimation, and control, have all been built on top of numerical optimization. In this same time, modern convex optimization has matured into a robust technology delivering globally optimal solutions in polynomial time. With advances in differentiable optimization and custom solvers capable of producing smooth derivatives, convex modeling has become fast, reliable, [...]

Abstract: Information-based search and coverage are important in planetary exploration and disaster response applications. Efficient information acquisition can help with increasing geological understanding or situational awareness. Heterogeneous robots, each with different sensing and motion modalities, can be coordinated to optimize search and coverage in a target region. Information maps, which estimate the importance of visiting [...]

Abstract: Numerous manipulation tasks, such as plug insertion and pipe assembly, demand an extremely high level of precision in pose estimation. Even minor errors, on the order of 2mm, can lead to task failure. While robots often rely on vision for object detection and localization, achieving consistent, high-precision localization using visual methods is not always [...]

Abstract: Although agriculture is a highly mechanized industry, numerous sectors like horticulture and floriculture heavily depend on manual labor because they require safe handling of plants and produce that can only be left to humans. However, many research and commercial robots have succeeded in several challenging dexterous manipulation tasks like harvesting, pruning, and plant health [...]

Abstract: The value alignment problem considers how robots can learn to behave in accordance with human values. Today, robot learning paradigms enable humans to provide data (e.g., preference labels or demonstrations), which the robot uses to update its behavior (e.g., reward model or policy) to be closer to the human’s values. However, the current paradigm [...]

Abstract: Large pre-trained models and internet data sources are key to general and efficient robot task learning. However, learning contact-rich behaviors, semantic task constraints, and robust task planning from internet data sources remains an open challenge. This proposal seeks to make progress towards a general robot task learning system leveraging pre-trained models and internet data. [...]

Abstract: How can we build generalist robot systems? Looking at fields such as vision and language, the common theme has been large scale end-to-end learning with massive, curated datasets. In robotics, on the other hand, scale alone may not be enough due to the significant multimodality of robotics tasks, lack of easily accessible data and [...]