PhD Thesis Proposal

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Personal mobile robots will soon be operating and closely interacting with us in human environments. They will offer a variety of assistive technologies that will augment our capabilities and enhance our lives. Dynamically stable mobile robots that actively balance can be effective personal mobile robots as they can be tall enough [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This thesis introduces the concept of visual subcategories. Many image understanding tasks such as object detection and image classification are formulated as binary classification problems, where the positive examples are instances (bounding boxes or images) of a specific object or scene category, and negative examples are background patches or images. Due [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-mm scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain better positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument smoothes tremor and scales hand [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Complex visual tasks often require high resolution imagery of specific phenomena but run too slowly to process large fields of view. In this thesis, we explore a general technique for camera control designed to maximize the high resolution imagery captured that is useful to the given task while minimizing excess imagery [...]

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Artists who work with visual media consider what a viewer will look at, how their attention will flow across the scene. They understand that attention is a limited resource and train themselves to use this resource well. In this thesis, our key insight is that algorithms to digitally manipulate artist-created visual [...]

Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Excavating regolith, or loose soil, on the Moon and Mars enables outposts, fuel depots, and sustained space exploration. In space missions mass is always at a premium because it is the main driver behind launch costs. Low mass, especially when combined with reduced gravity, results in machines with limited weight available [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: We want our robots to work in human environments. However, human environments are cluttered and clutter creates problems for robotic manipulation. We propose to develop a framework for manipulation in highly cluttered environments. We propose to rearrange the environment using prehensile and non-prehensile actions. We present our preliminary work, a framework [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Semantic understanding of the environment is critical for many robotic tasks such as path planning, mapping, and object tracking. While important progress has been made, extracting a rich representation of the environment remains a challenging problem. This process includes not only recognizing individual objects but also understanding the contextual relations among [...]

Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Across many rescue, surveillance, and scientific applications, there exists a broad need to perform wide-area reconnaissance and terrain surveys, for which unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly popular. This thesis considers the task of using one or more UAVs to locate an object of interest, provide continuous viewing, and rapidly re-acquire [...]

Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Task allocation involves the division of tasks among a team of robots, such that each robot is responsible for a subset of the tasks. Similarly, in role assignment, roles are typically defined to be performed by a single robot whose performance is independent of the composition of its team. Complex tasks, [...]