Title: Programmable light curtains for Safety Envelopes, SLAM and Navigation Abstract: Conventional robot perception and navigation pipelines are built using traditional sensors such as RGB cameras, stereo depth sensors and LiDARs.These sensors scan the entire scene in a fixed and uniform way. In contrast, programmable light curtains are a recently-invented, resource-efficient sensor that measure the [...]

Title: Lidar-Visual-Inertial Odometry via Modifications and Improvements to Super Odometry Abstract:     The main focus of this thesis involves improvements and extensions to Super Odometry, a preexisting method for lidar-inertial odometry. This was done in the context of the DARPA RACER program as a member of Carnegie Mellon's DEAD Fast team, aiming to provide reliable [...]

Title: Boundary-Aware Demons Algorithm with Applications in Electronic Waste Recycling Abstract Electronic waste (e-waste) refers to electronic devices that are nearing the end of their useful life, and are discarded, donated, or given away. Valuable metallic and plastic components in e-waste (gold, silver, platinum) is estimated to value upwards of $60 billion and although e-waste represents [...]

Title: Introspective Perception through Identifying Blur, Light Direction, and Angle-of-View Abstract Robotic perception tasks have achieved great performance, especially in autonomous vehicles and robot assistance. However, we still often do not understand how and when perception tasks fail. Researchers have achieved some success in creating introspective perception systems that detect when perception tasks will fail, [...]

Title: Image Synthesis with Appearance Decomposition Abstract: Our visual world is compositional and its appearance can be decomposed into various components. Leveraging these components can be beneficial for challenging image synthesis tasks. To this end, this thesis focuses on studying how appearance decomposition can improve image synthesis methods using two examples. (1) Structural decomposition: we introduce [...]

Title: A VPR-Based Technique for UAV Localization In Unseen Environments Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) primarily rely on GPS-assisted localization and navigation due to the accessibility and ubiquity of such systems. However, this presents a potentially catastrophic single point of failure that may prevent autonomous UAVs from becoming truly reliable, as GPS is prone to dropout, [...]

Title: GPS-Denied Global Visual-Inertial Ground Vehicle State Estimation via Image Registration Abstract: Robotic systems such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) often depend on GPS for navigation in outdoor environments. In GPS-denied environments, one approach to maintain a global state estimate is localizing based on preexisting georeferenced aerial or satellite imagery. However, this is inherently challenged [...]

Title: Learning to Distill Datasets by Matching Expert Training Trajectories Project Page: https://georgecazenavette.github.io/mtt-distillation/ Abstract: Dataset distillation is the task of synthesizing a small dataset such that a model trained on the synthetic set will match the test accuracy of the model trained on the full dataset. In this talk, we review 3 several of our recent [...]

Title: Coordinating Heterogeneous Teams for Urban Search and Rescue Abstract: The mission of Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) has drawn significant interest in robotics. Autonomous entities must be able to share knowledge efficiently to address visibility and collaboration challenges in a complex environment shortly after structural collapse catastrophes. In this thesis, we present methods to coordinate [...]

Title: Composition Learning in “Modular” Robot Systems Abstract: Modular robot and multi-robot systems share a concept in common: composition,  i.e. the study of how parts can be combined so they can be used to achieve certain objectives. Our vision is to enable robotic systems to configure and reconfigure themselves during field deployment, either autonomously or [...]

Title: Towards HD Map Updates With Crosswalk Change Detection From Vehicle-mounted Cameras Zoom: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/4452379705   Abstract: Many autonomous vehicles rely on high-definition maps that contain road layout and road semantics as priors for perception, planning and prediction. However, these maps can become stale over time as the road environment changes. This thesis develops a road monitoring framework [...]

Title: Taxim: An Example-based Simulation Model for GelSight Tactile Sensors and its Sim-to-Real Applications Location: NSH 4305 or Zoom https://cmu.zoom.us/j/91769761787?pwd=cGZ2RElKMVJaQ1NVNG5BdFQ0Ny9uQT09 Abstract: Simulation is widely used in robotics for system verification and large-scale data collection. However, simulating a robot system efficiently and with high fidelity, from sensing, perception to manipulation, has been a long-standing challenge. Tactile sensing, as [...]

Title: A Low-Cost Attitude Determination and Control System and Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed for CubeSats Zoom: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/92654622790?pwd=d0pYcTJ4K0xzdmYvUHFYWC9lMDBhQT09   Abstract: Since their initial development in the late 1990s, CubeSats have quickly grown popular due to their relatively low cost and short development period. However, CubeSat launches are prone to failure, with less than half of CubeSats completely fulfilling their [...]

Title: Driving by Dreaming: Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles Abstract: While there has been significant progress in deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) in urban driving settings, there remains a long-tail of challenging motion planning scenarios that must be addressed before truly driverless operation is possible. The current paradigm for motion planner [...]