PhD Thesis Proposal
A Data-Driven Approach to High Level Planning
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Motion planning for complex systems such as legged robots and mobile manipulators has proven to be a difficult task for a variety of reasons: not only must planning software consider a high-dimensional configuration space, but it must reason dynamically about how to apply forces to the real world. Accomplishing such planning [...]
Online Learning Techniques for Improving Robot Navigation in Unfamiliar Domains
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Many mobile robot applications require robots to act safely and intelligently in complex unfamiliar environments with little structure and limited or unavailable human supervision. As a robot is forced to operate in an environment that it was not engineered or trained for, various aspects of its performance will inevitably [...]
Algorithms for Answering Queries with Graphical Models
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: In numerous real world applications, from sensor networks to patient monitoring to intelligent buildings, probabilistic inference is necessary to make conclusions about the system in question in the face of uncertainty. The key problem in all those settings is to compute the probability distribution over some random variables of [...]