PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: In many domains, teams of hundreds of agents must cooperatively plan to perform tasks in a complex, uncertain environment. Naively, this requires that each agent take into account every teammates' state, observation, and choice of action when making decisions about its own actions. This results in a huge joint policy space [...]

Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: This thesis tackles the problem of automatically discovering and modeling objects from a collection of images from the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) environment. I propose an approach that can discover object instances under severe clutter, occlusion, changes of view point, heterogeneity of object appearance and imperfect segmentation. The proposed approach [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Robots that can operate in human environments in a safe and robust manner would be of tremendous benefit to society in general, due to their immense potential as assistance providers to humans. However, robots to this day have seen limited application outside of the industrial setting in environments such as homes [...]