Carnegie Mellon University
MSR Thesis Talk: FNU Abhimanyu
Title: Improving Robotic Ultrasound AI Using Optical Flow Abstract: Ultrasound is an important modality for medical intervention such as vascular access because it is safe, portable, and low-cost. However, ultrasound scanning requires trained sonographers who are scarce, and it can be challenging to perform ultrasound examinations in disaster or battlefield scenarios. This motivates us to automate [...]
Vision-based Proprioceptive and Tactile Sensing for Soft Robots
Abstract: Soft robotic manipulators present many unique advantages in difficult manipulation tasks. The inherent compliance of soft robots' constituent deformable material makes them safe and reliable in delicate tasks such as harvesting fruit and assisting in household work. To address challenges in proprioceptive and tactile sensing for soft robots, we present a family of vision-based [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Lucas Casanova De Oliveira Nogueira
Title: SuperLoop: a LIDAR-based SLAM Back-end for Underground Exploration Abstract: Robots deployed in underground scenarios require a SLAM system that can handle a variety of challenges, such as the absence of GPS, large scale maps, bad illumination, and geometrically degenerate environments. It is nearly impossible for any SLAM solution to handle all these challenges perfectly, specially [...]
Learning via Visual-Tactile Interaction
Abstract: Humans learn by interacting with their surroundings using all of their senses. The first of these senses to develop is touch, and it is the first way that young humans explore their environment, learn about objects, and tune their cost functions (via pain or treats). Yet, robots are often denied this highly informative and [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Neil Khera
Title: PyCubed-Mini: A Low-Cost, Open-Source Satellite Research Platform Abstract: Satellite development has become more accessible with decreasing launch costs and shrinking hardware. However, the expenses associated with pre-built satellite kits remain high, making it difficult for student and hobbyist teams to participate. The lack of standardized satellite hardware and software further adds to the challenge, [...]
Strategy assessment for solving rich physical problems
Abstract: We present a framework that acts as an "intuitive physics reasoner" which takes in strategies expressed in natural language (whether from a human or LLM), and assesses their validity based on a physics knowledge library. We believe the ability to quickly determine whether a strategy is worth considering and allocating further resources to planning [...]
MSR Thesis Talk: Siva Kailas
Title: Multi-Robot Information Gathering for Spatiotemporal Environment Modelling Abstract: Learning to predict or forecast spatiotemporal (ST) environmental processes from a sparse set of samples collected autonomously is a difficult task from both a sampling perspective (collecting the best sparse samples) and from a learning perspective (predicting unseen locations or forecasting the next timestep). We investigate [...]
MRS Thesis Talk: Ruijie Fu
Title: Towards Mechanical Communication in Multi-Agent Locomotive Systems: Principally Kinematic Robots on a Shared Platform Abstract: Many biological multi-agent systems exhibit a mechanism for information exchange among individuals known as mechanical communication, which leads to the emergence of collective behavior within the group. One such example is the swarming behavior of bacteria, where they form rafts [...]
RI Faculty Business Meeting
Meeting for RI Faculty. Discussions include various department topics, policies, and procedures. Generally meets weekly.
Robot Learning, Wearable Sensing, and Teleoperation in Pursuit of Robotic Caregivers
Abstract Designing safe and reliable robotic assistance for caregiving is a grand challenge in robotics. A sixth of the United States population is over the age of 65 and in 2014 more than a quarter of the population had a disability. Robotic caregivers could positively benefit society; yet, physical robotic assistance presents several challenges and [...]
Personalized Context-aware Affective Nonverbal Robot Feedback
Abstract: We first consider the problem of estimating context, specifically key features of the human state. We predict engagement-related events in an educational activity before the end of that activity, which could allow the robot to provide feedback early enough to improve the human's experience. We then explore generating nonverbal affective robot behavior by correlating [...]
RI Faculty Business Meeting
Meeting for RI Faculty. Discussions include various department topics, policies, and procedures. Generally meets weekly.
Redefining the Perception-Action Interface: Visual Action Representations for Contact-Centric Manipulation
Abstract: In robotics, understanding the link between perception and action is pivotal. Typically, perception systems process sensory data into state representations like segmentations and bounding boxes, which a planner uses to plan actions. However, this state estimation approach can fail in environments with partial observability, and in cases with challenging object properties like transparency and deformability. [...]
RI Picnic
The RI Picnic will be held at the Vietnam Veteran's Pavilion @ Schenley Park on Overlook Drive, Tuesday, August 29, 1-7pm. SOCIALIZE, EAT, DRINK & BE MERRY! Receive this year's RI giveaway item; witness the exciting final rounds of the annual RI croquet tournament; enjoy lawn games right at our own pavilion area. Plan to spend some time at the [...]
Continual Robot Learning: Benchmarks and Modular Methods
Abstract: Humans adapt continuously to the world around us, allowing us to acquire new skills and explore diverse environments seamlessly. Current AI methods, however, cannot attain this versatility. Instead, they are typically trained with vast datasets, and learn all tasks simultaneously. However, the trained models have limited ability to adapt to changing contexts, and are [...]
Architecture and Algorithms for Space-Based Global Wildlife Tracking
Abstract: Accurate satellite based positioning revolutionized several industries over the past two decades from agriculture to transportation. However, conventional GNSS receivers consume significant amounts of energy and are too large for many applications, including wildlife-tracking which is critical for conservation efforts and improving our understanding of the global climate. To address this capability gap, we [...]
Multi-Human 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Videos
Abstract: We study the problem of multi-human 3D reconstruction from videos captured in the wild. Human movements are dynamic, and accurately reconstructing them in various settings is crucial for developing immersive social telepresence, assistive humanoid robots, and augmented reality systems. However, creating such a system requires addressing fundamental issues with previous works regarding the data [...]
Language-Conditioned Object Detection and Manipulation
Abstract: Traditional object detection methods are often confined to predefined object vocabularies, limiting their versatility in real-world scenarios where robots need to understand and execute diverse household tasks. Additionally, the 2D and 3D perception communities have typically pursued separate approaches tailored to their respective domains. In this thesis, we present a language-conditioned object detector with [...]
How I Learned to Love Blobs: The Power of Gaussian Representations in Differentiable Rendering and Optimization
Abstract: In this thesis, we explore the use of Gaussian Representations in multiple application areas of computer vision and robotics. In particular, we design a ray-based differentiable renderer for 3D Gaussians that can be used to solve multiple classic computer vision problems in a unified manner. For example, we can reconstruct 3D shapes from color, [...]
Watch, Practice, Improve: Towards In-the-wild Manipulation
Abstract: The longstanding dream of many roboticists is to see robots perform diverse tasks in diverse environments. To build such a robot that can operate anywhere, many methods train on robotic interaction data. While these approaches have led to significant advances, they rely on heavily engineered setups or high amounts of supervision, neither of which [...]
Generating Beautiful Pixels
Abstract: In this talk, I will present three experiments that use low-level image statistics to generate high-resolution detailed outputs. In the first experiment, I will use 2D pixels to efficiently mine hard examples for better learning. Simply biasing ray sampling towards hard ray examples enables learning of neural fields with more accurate high-frequency detail in less [...]
Towards Reliable Computer Vision Systems
Abstract: The real world has infinite visual variation – across viewpoints, time, space, and curation. As deep visual models become ubiquitous in high-stakes applications, their ability to generalize across such variation becomes increasingly important. In this talk, I will present opportunities to improve such generalization at different stages of the ML lifecycle: first, I will [...]
Towards Photorealistic Dynamic Capture and Animation of Human Hair and Head
Abstract: Realistic human avatars play a key role in immersive virtual telepresence. To reach a high level of realism, a human avatar needs to faithfully reflect human appearance. A human avatar should also be drivable and express natural motions. Existing works have made significant progress in building drivable realistic face avatars, but they rarely include [...]
Modeling Dynamic Clothing for Data-Driven Photorealistic Avatars
Abstract: In this thesis, we aim to build photorealistic animatable avatars of humans wearing complex clothing in a data-driven manner. Such avatars will be a critical technology to enable future applications such as immersive telepresence in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Existing full-body avatars that jointly model geometry and view-dependent texture using Variational [...]
Manipulation Among Movable Objects for Pick-and-Place Tasks in Cluttered 3D Workspaces
Abstract: In cluttered real-world workspaces, simple pick-and-place tasks for robot manipulators can be quite challenging to solve. Often there is no collision-free trajectory that allows the robot to grasp and extract a desired object from the scene. This requires motion planning algorithms to reason about rearranging some of the “movable” clutter in the scene so [...]
Transforming Hollywood Visual Effects with Graphics and Vision
Abstract: Paul will describe his path to developing visual effects technology used in hundreds of movies, including The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, Benjamin Button, Avatar, Maleficent, Furious 7, and Blade Runner: 2049. These techniques include image-based modeling and rendering, high dynamic range imaging, image-based lighting, and high-resolution facial scanning for photoreal digital actors. Paul will also [...]
Vision without labels
Abstract: Deep learning has revolutionized all aspects of computer vision, but its successes have come from supervised learning at scale: large models trained on ever larger labeled datasets. However this reliance on labels makes these systems fragile when it comes to new scenarios or new tasks where labels are unavailable. This is in stark contrast to [...]
RI Faculty Business Meeting
Meeting for RI Faculty. Discussions include various department topics, policies, and procedures. Generally meets weekly.
Learning Meets Gravity: Robots that Learn to Embrace Dynamics from Data
Abstract: Despite the incredible capabilities (speed and repeatability) of our hardware today, many robot manipulators are deliberately programmed to avoid dynamics – moving slow enough so they can adhere to quasi-static assumptions of the world. In contrast, people frequently (and subconsciously) make use of dynamic phenomena to manipulate everyday objects – from unfurling blankets, to [...]