PhD Thesis Proposal
A Minimalist Dynamic Climbing Robot: Modeling, Analysis and Experiments
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Dynamics in locomotion is highly useful, as can be seen in animals and gradually in robots. For instance, chimpanzees are dynamic climbers that can reach virtually any part of a tree and even move to neighboring trees, while sloths are quasistatic climbers confined only to a few branches. Although [...]
Understanding and Recreating Visual Appearance under Natural Illumination
Event Location: Smith Hall 100Abstract: The appearance of an outdoor scene is determined to a great extent by the prevailing illumination conditions. However, most practical computer vision applications treat illumination more as a nuisance rather than a source of signal. In this thesis proposal, we suggest that we should instead embrace illumination, even in the [...]
Low-Altitude Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1109Abstract: Currently deployed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on preplanned missions or teleoperation and do not actively incorporate information about obstacles, landing sites, wind, position uncertainty, and other aerial vehicles during online trajectory planning. However, to enable autonomous missions in cluttered environments it is necessary to react to all available [...]
Robust Monocular Vision-based Navigation for a Miniature Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1109Abstract: Recently the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has expanded from military to civilian applications. Contrary to remote-controlled tasks in a high altitude, low-altitude flight in an urban environment requires a higher level of autonomy to respond to complex and unpredictable situations. Vision-based methods for autonomous navigation have been [...]
Modeling and Controlling Light Transport for Scene Recovery and Rendering
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Global illumination effects, such as inter-reflections, sub-surface scattering and volumetric scattering form an integral part of our daily visual experience. In fact, it is almost impossible to find a real world scene without any global illumination. Unfortunately, however, due to its complex nature, it is hard to build tractable [...]
Cortical Prosthetic Control of an Artificial Arm, Wrist, and Hand
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 3305Abstract: In a recent demonstration, a monkey was able to feed itself with a robot arm it controlled through a cortical brain-computer interface (BCI) [1]. This work extended past brain control based on 3-D target acquisition alone to add the control of grip aperture. We now extend this further to [...]
Constrained Manipulation Planning
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Abstract: Every planning problem in robotics involves constraints. Whether the robot must avoid collision or joint limits, there are always states that are not permissible. Some constraints are straightforward to satisfy while others can be so stringent that the allowed states are very difficult to identify. What makes constrained planning [...]
Parallel Algorithms for Real-time Motion Planning
Event Location: Hillman Center 6501Abstract: Real-time motion planning in complex dynamic environments requires new algorithms that exploit parallel computation. Robots that can move autonomously in complex and dynamic environments are desired for many purposes, such as efficient autonomous passenger vehicles, robots for industrial, agricultural, and military applications, etc. As an example, automating passenger vehicles would [...]
Robotics Framework for Automated Construction of Autonomous Manipulation Programs
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 3305Abstract: Society is becoming more automated with robots beginning to perform most tasks in factories and starting to help out in home and office environments. Arguably, one of the most important functions of robots is the ability to manipulate their environment to accomplish basic tasks. However, the space of possible [...]