PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: This thesis proposal considers the problem of training machine learning classifiers in domains where data are very high dimensional and training examples are extremely limited or impossible to collect for all classes of interest. As a case study, we focus on the application of thought recognition, where the objective is to [...]

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: Many applications today involving mobile robots require human control because the task to solve or the environment to move in is too complicated for existing fully autonomous systems. While computers today are already better than humans at controlling machines at a low level and can provide operators with a higher level [...]

Event Location: GHC 8115Abstract: Humanoid robots represent the state of the art in complex robot systems, but the design of controllers can be challenging and tedious. High performance controllers that can handle unknown perturbations will be required if complex robots are to one day interact safely with people in everyday environments. The high degree of [...]

Event Location: GHC 6115Abstract: Robots with legs have a number of advantages over those with wheels, such as greater ability to navigate through rough terrain, more flexible manipulation of objects, and fully holonomic control of the body. However, leveraging these advantages on a multi-legged system is computationally intensive and often relegates leg usage exclusively to [...]

Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Maps are important for both human and robot navigation. Given a route, driving assistance systems brief maps to guide human drivers to their destinations. Similarly, topological maps of road network provide a robotic vehicle with information about where it can drive and what driving behaviors it should use. Maps simplify both [...]