PhD Thesis Proposal
Formulation and Calibration of Fast, Accurate Vehicle Motion Models
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: High performance wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) require fast, accurate motion models for planning and control. This thesis addresses two challenges to producing these models: the tradeoff between fidelity and speed in model formulation, and the need for laborious calibration procedures. To address the first challenge, I propose the formulation of “enhanced” [...]
Coherent Scene Understanding with 3D Geometric Reasoning
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Going beyond object detection and semantic segmentation, coherent scene understanding simultaneously considers multiple potential objects and surfaces in the image and reasons over them in a 3D geometric context to derive a coherent interpretation of the scene behind the image, during which many visual ambiguities can be resolved. To achieve this [...]
Multi-agent Pickup and Delivery Planning with Transfers
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Many logistics problems require mobile agents to retrieve and deliver a set of items. For example, postal services and couriers retrieve and deliver letters and packages, while taxis pick up and drop off passengers. These problems are instances of the Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP), in which a set of mobile [...]
Self-Supervised Learning on Mobile Robots Using Acoustics, Vibration, and Visual Models to Build Rich Semantic Terrain Maps
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Humans and robots would benefit from having rich semantic maps of the terrain in which they operate. Mobile robots equipped with sensors and perception software could build such maps as they navigate through a new environment. This information could then be used by humans or robots for better localization and path [...]
Perceptually Valid Dynamics for Smiles and Blinks
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: Human observers are particularly adept at detecting anomalies in realistic computer-generated (CG) facial animations. With an increased demand for CG characters in education and entertainment applications, it is important to animate accurate, realistic facial expressions. In this thesis proposal, we develop a framework to explore representations of two key facial expressions: [...]
Hybrid Markov / Non-Markov Localization for Long-Term Autonomy of Mobile Robots in Varying Indoor Environments
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: There is considerable interest in having robots continue to perform autonomously over time in human environments despite changes in their environment. Most state-of-the-art robot localization and mapping approaches assume that the world can be represented as a static map. However, real human environments are not static - some areas like corridors [...]
Robot Motion for Seamless Human-Robot Collaboration
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to enable robots to produce motion that is suitable for human-robot collaboration and co-existence. Most motion in robotics is purely functional: industrial robots move to package parts, vacuuming robots move to suck dust, and personal robots move to clean up a dirty table. This type [...]
Towards Autonomous Control of Snake Robots
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Snake robots are ideally suited to highly confined environments because their small cross-sections and highly redundant kinematics allow them to enter and move through tight spaces with a high degree of dexterity. Despite these theoretical advantages, snake robots also pose a number of practical challenges that have limited their usefulness in [...]
Spatial, Temporal and Spatio-temporal Correspondence for Computer Vision Problems
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Many computer vision problems, such as object classification, motion estimation or shape registration rely on solving the correspondence problem. Existing algorithms to solve the correspondence problems are usually NP-hard, difficult to approximate and lack mechanism for feature selection. This proposal addresses the correspondence problem in computer vision, and proposes two new [...]
Characteristic Prosody and Meaning in Speech Synthesis
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: A new trainable model and method for generating prosody for speech synthesis is proposed, in which a relationship between pragmatics, intonational phonology, and performance is made explicit in a language-neutral manner. The literature of pragmatics and intonation is broad, but produces only coarse descriptions and few actionable models (Steedman; Pierrehumbert and [...]