PhD Thesis Proposal
Principled Search Space Design
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Abstract: Motion planning and navigation of outdoor mobile robots has received a lot of attention in the last thirty years, yet today it still remains a challenging problem. Among the many reasons, three stand out. First, most physical mobility systems feature differential constraints that render the coupling between the control [...]
Realtime Contextual Trajectory Set Generation for Local Area Motion Planning
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robotic motion planning is known to be an NP Hard problem. Many real-world applications employ hierarchical planning to decompose a complex problem into a set of sub-problems, each addressed by a sub-planner that makes different trade-offs and assumptions. To achieve scalability, long-range planners such as D* simplify the robot’s motion model, [...]
Data-driven Scene Parsing With the Visual Memex
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: This proposal is concerned with the problem of image understanding. Given a single static image, the goal is to explain the entire image by recognizing all of the objects depicted in the image. We formulate the problem of image understanding as image parsing -- breaking up the image into semantically meaningful [...]
Shedding Light on Modeling: Active Illumination for Mapping of Subterranean Voids
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Subterranean environments are among the most hazardous, remote and unexplored in the solar system. Subsurface applications represent the prime unexploited opportunity for robotic modeling, yet robot mappers are seldom utilized. Human survey is often preferred for reasons of economy, resulting in unnecessary risk and substandard quality. There is urgent need to [...]
Margin-based Spatial and Temporal Alignment for Computer Vision Problems
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Spatial and temporal alignment are fundamental problems in computer vision that arise naturally in many real-world applications ranging from object localization and visual tracking to image categorization and activity recognition. Most alignment algorithms can be posed as an optimization problem of an energy function over a set of allowable spatial or [...]
Mechanics of Locomotion
Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Animals often use gaits - cyclic changes in shape producing a net displacement - to move through their environments. In robotics, we are interested in planning motions for artificial systems that can match or exceed the locomotive capabilities of animals. A fundamental question of locomotion is "What are the characteristics of [...]
A Biologically Grounded Approach to Science Autonomy
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: As we reach out to explore the universe time, distance, and danger compel us to use robotic proxies to conduct exploration missions. Limitations on or the absence of communications with our robotic explorers demand science autonomy. While exploring robots will encounter stimuli that are valuable for completing mission objectives. Robotic explorers [...]
Hippocampal Representations and the Learning of Cognitive Maps
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Understanding how neural circuits in the brain enable complex, flexible behavior is now a tangible endeavor. This has in large part been made possible by the ability to record from neurons in mammals, such as rats and monkeys, as the animals are performing a behavioral task. One can then ask how [...]
Reducing Redundancies in the Search Space for Planning with Incomplete Information
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Planning with uncertainty in the model of the environment is a common, and difficult, problem. Typically, any differences in the past observations between two states causes the planner to plan for them as completely different states. This work is based on the fact that not all past observations are relevant to [...]