PhD Thesis Proposal

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Tasks such as street mapping and security surveillance seek a route that traverses a given space to perform a function. These task functions may involve mapping the space for accurate modeling, sensing the space for unusual activity, or processing the space for object detection. When these tasks are performed [...]

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Optimization systems traditionally focus on static problems, also known as offline or a priori optimization problems. Many real-world problems may be better modeled as dynamic optimization problems, also known as stochastic, in situ, or online optimization problems. In these types of problems, the fitness landscape of the search space [...]

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Achieving robust and reliable operation even in complex unstructured environments is a central goal of field robotics. As the environments and scenarios to which robots are applied have continued to grow in complexity, so has the challenge of properly defining preferences between various actions, and the terrains they result [...]

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1305Abstract: Dynamics in locomotion is highly useful, as can be seen in animals and gradually in robots. For instance, chimpanzees are dynamic climbers that can reach virtually any part of a tree and even move to neighboring trees, while sloths are quasistatic climbers confined only to a few branches. Although [...]