MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Yifan Ding – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

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, [...]

RI Seminar
Todd Murphey
Professor
Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University

Active Learning in Robot Motion Control

1305 Newell Simon Hall

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Tanya Marwah – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell Simon Hall 4201

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 [...]

Special Talk
Tesca Fitzgerald
PhD candidate
Computer Science, Georgia Tech College of Computing

Human-guided Task Transfer for Interactive Robots

GATES-HILLMAN 4405

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Pragna Mannam – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Gines Hidalgo Martinez – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 1109

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 [...]

Faculty Events

RI Faculty Social

Newell-Simon Hall 4201

All Robotics Institute faculty are invited to attend this informal team-building business/social event. Beverages and snacks will be provided.

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Donglai Xiang – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

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 [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Wentao Yuan – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Title: 3D Shape Completion and Canonical Pose Estimation with Structured Neural Networks   Abstract: 3D point cloud is an efficient and flexible representation of 3D structures and the raw output of many 3D sensors. Recently, neural networks operating on point clouds have shown superior performance on various 3D understanding tasks, thanks to their power to [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Planning under Uncertainty with Multiple Heuristics

GHC 6115

Abstract: Many robotic tasks, such as mobile manipulation, often require interaction with unstructured environments and are subject to imperfect sensing and actuation. This brings substantial uncertainty into the problems. Reasoning under this uncertainty can provide higher level of robustness but is computationally significantly more challenging. More specifically, sequential decision making under motion and sensing uncertainty [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Rawal Khirodkar – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Title: Leveraging Simulation for Computer Vision   Abstract: A large amount of labeled data is required to train deep neural networks. The process of data annotation on such a large scale is expensive and time-consuming. A promising alternative in this regard is to use simulation to generate labeled synthetic data. However, a network trained solely [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Dexterous Manipulation via Simple Robot Hands

GHC 8102

Abstract: Most of the industrial robotic applications nowadays can only deal with pick-and-place manipulation, in which fixed graspings are the only interactions between the object and the robot hand. Simple hands, such as pinch grippers and suction cups, suffice to accomplish such tasks. However, there exist many unsolved automation problems where more dexterous manipulations are [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Maximilian Sieb – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Title: Visual Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation   Abstract:   Imitation learning has been successfully applied to solve a variety of tasks in complex domains where an explicit reward function is not available. However, most imitation learning methods require access to the robot's actions during demonstration. This stands in a stark contrast to how we [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Enabling Role-Reversible Human-Robot Interaction by Leveraging Standardized Tools for Provider-Receiver Interactions

NSH 3305

Abstract: Developing 'social intelligence' for assistive robots to seamlessly interact with humans remains an open research challenge. However, socially assistive robots typically engage in types of interactions that already exist between humans, which makes models of human-human interactions useful to inform the design of robot social behaviors. In particular, in applications such as healthcare, therapy [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Nikhil Jog – MSR Thesis Talk

Title: Highly Miniaturized Robots for Inspection of Small Nuclear Piping   Abstract: Bomb making in the 20th century resulted in the creation of massive facilities to produce Uranium. As part of a multi-billion-dollar agenda, the measurement of radioactivity is required for the safe disposal of residual Uranium in piping. Manual techniques have proven too approximate, [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Contrastive View Predictive Learning with 3D-Bottlenecked RNNs

GHC 6115

Abstract: In this talk, I will describe our recent work on neural architectures for visual recognition, which use 3D not as input nor as the desired output space, but rather as the bottleneck of the learned representations. We consider embodied agents moving in otherwise static worlds equipped with these architectures; they learn 3D visual feature [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Chao Cao – MSR Thesis Talk

Newell-Simon Hall 4305

Title: Topological Path Planning for Mobile Robot Applications   Abstract: Many path planning problems in mobile robot applications can be solved more efficiently in the topological space. By using the language of topology, the richer spatial information failed to captured by graph/grid-based map representations can be explicitly expressed and exploited. With that, it is possible [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Tao Chen

NSH 1109

Title: Deep Reinforcement Learning with Prior Knowledge   Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning has been applied to many domains from computer games, natural language processing, recommendation systems to robotics.  While model-free reinforcement learning algorithms are promising approaches to learning policies without knowledge of the system dynamics, they usually require much more data. In this thesis, we [...]