PhD Thesis Proposal
Carnegie Mellon University
Learning Dense 3D Object Reconstruction without Geometric Supervision
Abstract: Geometric alignment across visual data has been the fundamental issue for effective and efficient computer vision algorithms. The established pixel correspondences between images indirectly infer the underlying 3D geometry, physically or semantically. While this builds the foundation of classical multi-view 3D reconstruction algorithms such as Structure from Motion (SfM) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Eye Gaze for Assistive Manipulation
Abstract: Full robot autonomy is the traditional goal of robotics research. To work in a human-inhabited world, however, robots will often need to collaborate with humans. Many scenarios require human users to teleoperate robots to perform tasks, a paradigm that appears everywhere from space exploration, to disaster recovery, to assistive robotics. This collaboration enables tasks [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Stability-Centric Mechanics for Rigid Body Manipulation
Abstract: The repertoire of human manipulation is filled with creative use of contacts to move the object about the hand and the environment. It’s the combination of these skills that makes human manipulation dexterous. However, in most robotic applications the robot just fix all contact points on the object and do grasping. Reliable robot manipulation [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotic Grasping in the Wild
Zoom Link Abstract Robotics and artificial intelligence have witnessed tremendous progress in the past decade. Yet, we are still far from building the general purpose robot butler that can autonomously operate in homes and help with manipulation tasks like household chores. Grasping is an important action primitive for manipulation and needs to generalize to unstructured [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Active Vision: Autonomous Aerial Cinematography with Learned Artistic Decision-Making
Zoom Link Abstract: Aerial cinematography is revolutionizing industries that require live and dynamic camera viewpoints such as entertainment, sports, and security. Fundamentally, it is a tool with immense potential to improve human creativity, expressiveness, and sharing of experiences. However, safely piloting a drone while filming a moving target in the presence of obstacles is immensely [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Efficient Robot Decision-Making for Achieving Multiple Independent Tasks
Zoom Link Abstract: We focus on robotics applications where a robot is required to accomplish a set of tasks that are partially observable and evolve independently of each other according to their dynamics. One such domain that we target in this work is decision-making for a robot waiter waiting tables at a restaurant. The robot [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Provably Constant-time Motion Planning
Zoom Link Abstract: In manufacturing and warehouse scenarios, robots often perform recurring manipulation tasks in structured environments. Fast and reliable motion planning is one of the key elements that ensure efficient operations in such environments. A very common example scenario is of manipulators working at conveyor belts, where they have limited time to pick moving [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Safe and Resilient Multi-Robot Systems: Heterogeneity and Human Presence
Zoom Link Abstract: In the mission of a multi-robot team, the large number of robots behave like a system that relies on networking to enable smooth information propagation and inter-robot interaction as the mission evolves in a collective fashion. Key to the success of mission operation demands for safe and reliable robot interactions within the [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Heuristics for routing and scheduling of Spatio-Temporal type problems in industrial environments
Zoom Link Abstract: Spatio-temporal problems are fairly common in industrial environments. In practice, these problems come with different characteristics and are often very hard to solve optimally. So practitioners prefer to develop heuristics that exploit mathematical structure specific to the problem for obtaining good performance. In this proposal, I will present work on heuristics for [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Understanding, Exploiting and Improving Inter-view Relationships
Zoom Link Abstract: Multi-view machine learning has received substantial attention in various applications over recent years. These applications typically involve learning on data obtained from multiple sources of information, such as, for example, in multi-sensor systems such as self-driving cars and patient bed-side monitoring. Learning models for such applications can often benefit from leveraging not [...]