PhD Thesis Proposal

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Water drops are present throughout our daily lives. Microscopic droplets create fog and mist, and large drops fall as rain. Because of their shape and refractive properties, water drops exhibit a wide variety of visual effects. If not directly illuminated by a light source, then they are difficult to see. But [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]