Carnegie Mellon University
Light Sheet Depth Imaging
Abstract: Once confined to industrial manufacturing facilities and research labs, robots are increasingly entering everyday life. As specialized robots are developed for tasks such as autonomous driving, package delivery, and aerial videography, there is a growing need for affordable depth sensing technology. Robots use sensors like scanning LIDAR, depth cameras, and passive stereo cameras to [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Towards Generalization and Efficiency in Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: In classic supervised machine learning, a learning agent behaves as a passive observer: it receives examples from some external environment which it has no control over and then makes predictions. Reinforcement Learning (RL), on the other hand, is fundamentally interactive: an autonomous agent must learn how to behave in an unknown and possibly hostile [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Akshat Agarwal – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Learning Transferable Cooperative Behavior in Multi-Agent Teams Abstract: We study the emergence of cooperative behavior and communication protocols in multi-agent teams, for collaboratively accomplishing tasks like coverage control and formation control for swarms. Using graph neural networks to model inter-agent communications, we present state-of-the-art results in a fully decentralized execution framework which assumes [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Yifan Ding – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Decentralized Multiple Mobile Depots Route Planning for Replenishing Persistent Surveillance Robots Abstract: Persistent surveillance of a target space using multiple robots has numerous applications. The continuous operation in these applications is challenged by the limited onboard battery capacity of the persistent robots. We consider the problem for replenishing persistent robots using mobile depots, [...]
Active Learning in Robot Motion Control
Abstract: Motion motivated by information needs can be found throughout natural systems, yet there is comparatively little work in robotics on analyzing and synthesizing motion for information. Instead, engineering analysis of robots and animal motion typically depends on defining objectives and rewards in terms of states and errors on states. This is how we formulate [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Tanya Marwah – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Generating 3D Human Animations from Single Monocular Images Abstract: Endowing AI systems with the ability to formulate a three-dimensional understanding of human appearance from a single RGB image is an important component technology for applications such as person re-identification, biometrics, virtual reality and augmented reality. However, jointly inferring the texture map and 3D [...]
Human-guided Task Transfer for Interactive Robots
Abstract: Adaptability is an essential skill in human cognition, enabling us to draw from our extensive, life-long experiences with various objects and tasks in order to address novel problems. To date, most robots do not have this kind of adaptability, and yet, as our expectations of robots’ interactive and assistive capacity grows, it will be [...]
Pragna Mannam – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Model-free Sensorless Manipulation Abstract: This thesis is a study of 2D manipulation without sensing and planning, by exploring the effects of unplanned randomized action sequences on 2D object pose uncertainty. Our approach uses sensorless reorienting of an object to achieve a determined pose, regardless of the initial pose. Without using sensors and models [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Gines Hidalgo Martinez – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: OpenPose: Whole-Body Pose Estimation Abstract: We present the first single-network approach for 2D whole-body (body, face, hand, and foot) pose estimation, capable of detecting an arbitrary number of people from in-the-wild images. Our method maintains constant real-time performance regardless of the number of people in the image. This network is trained in a [...]
RI Faculty Social
All Robotics Institute faculty are invited to attend this informal team-building business/social event. Beverages and snacks will be provided.
Donglai Xiang – MSR Thesis Talk
Title: Monocular Total Capture: Pose Face, Body, and Hands in the Wild Abstract: We present the first method to capture the 3D total motion of a target person from a monocular view input. Given an image or a monocular video, our method reconstructs the motion from body, face, and fingers represented by a 3D deformable [...]