Communication Efficient and Differentially Private Optimization
Abstract: In recent years, the integration of communication efficiency and differential privacy in distributed optimization has gained significant attention, motivated by large-scale applications such as Federated Learning (FL), where both data privacy and efficient communication are critical. This thesis explores the development of novel techniques to address these challenges, with a focus on distributed mean [...]
Towards a Universal Data Engine for Robotics and Beyond
Abstract: Robotics researchers have been attempting to extend data-driven breakthroughs in fields like computer vision and language processing into robot learning. However, unlike vision or language domains where massive amounts of data is readily available on the internet, training robotic policies relies on physical and interactive data collected via interacting with the physical world -- [...]
Learning for Dynamic Robot Manipulation of Deformable and Transparent Objects
Abstract: Dynamics, softness, deformability, and difficult-to-detect objects will be critical for new domains in robotic manipulation. But there are complications--including unmodelled dynamic effects, infinite-dimensional state spaces of deformable objects, and missing features from perception. This talk explores learning methods based on multi-view sensing, acoustics, physics-based regularizations, and Koopman operators and proposes a novel multi-finger soft [...]
HaptiClay: An Interactive Haptic Interface for Gestured Concretization of Polynomial Functions
Abstract: In this work we present HaptiClay, a low-cost kinesthetic haptic interface that elevates the understanding of mathematics language by providing embodied non-verbal representations of math concepts. Our interface integrates four key components: a haptic device, a high-level simulation that communicates with a low-level controller for force and position updates, a low-level controller that executes [...]
High-resolution cloth simulation in milliseconds: Efficient GPU Cloth Simulation with Non-distance Barriers and Subspace Reuse Interactions
Abstract: We show how to push the performance of high-resolution cloth simulation, making the simulation interactive (in milliseconds) for models with one million degrees of freedom (DOFs) while keeping every triangle untangled. The guarantee of being penetration-free is inspired by the interior-point method, which converts the inequality constraints to barrier potentials. Nevertheless, we propose a [...]
Better Standards for Trajectory Forecasting: Data, Evaluation, and Methods
Abstract: Ensuring pedestrian safety in dynamic environments is a key challenge for autonomous systems, particularly in dynamic, multi-agent environments. Trajectory forecasting plays a central role in enabling these systems to anticipate pedestrian behaviors and respond appropriately. This thesis addresses three core limitations in trajectory forecasting systems which impede safe and robust trajectory forecasting: inadequate evaluation protocols [...]
Bridging Generative and Discriminative Learning with Diffusion Models
Abstract: Generative models have advanced significantly, synthesizing photorealistic images, videos, and text. Building on this progress, our work explores the potential of diffusion models to bridge generative and discriminative learning, uncovering new pathways for leveraging their strengths in visual perception tasks. In the first part, we propose Diff-2-in-1, a unified framework for multi-modal data generation [...]
Bring Hand to The Air: Towards Universal Aerial Manipulation
Abstract: Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted the interest of researchers, industry, and the general public in many applications. Noticing that high-altitude tasks sometimes require active interaction with the environment, there have been more and more works focusing on aerial manipulation recently. Each of them has demonstrated the ability to use a specific aerial manipulator [...]
Robust Reinforcement Learning for Safety Critical Applications via Curricular Learning
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) presents great promises for autonomous agents. However, when using robots in a safety critical domain, a system has to be robust enough to be deployed in real life. For example, the robot should be able to perform across different scenarios it will encounter. The robot should avoid entering undesirable and irreversible [...]
Practical Challenges and Recent Advances in Data Attribution
Abstract: Data plays an increasingly crucial role in both the performance and the safety of AI models. Data attribution is an emerging family of techniques aimed at quantifying the impact of individual training data points on a model trained on them, which has found data-centric applications such as training data curation, instance-based explanation, and copyright [...]
Spatial Reasoning and Semantic Representations for Intelligent Multi-Robot Exploration and Navigation
Abstract: Autonomous robot exploration is widely applied in areas such as search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and structural inspection. Multi-robot exploration has garnered significant attention in the robotics research community, as it enables faster task completion and greater coverage than a single robot can achieve. However, it presents unique challenges: behavior coordination is complex, communication [...]
Autonomous Sensor Insertion and Exchange for Cornstalk Monitoring Robot
Abstract: Interactive sensors are an important component of robotic systems but often require manual replacement due to wear and tear. Automating this process can enhance system autonomy and facilitate long-term deployment. We developed an autonomous sensor exchange and maintenance system for an agriculture crop monitoring robot that inserts a nitrate sensor into cornstalks. A novel [...]
Leveraging Sense of Agency to Improve the Experience of Control Over Assistive Robots
Abstract: In an age of autonomous driving and robotics, we are increasingly engaging with robots that deploy autonomous assistance. Cognitive science and human-computer interaction literature tells us that, when we apply autonomy in assistive settings, we are often augmenting the user's sense of agency over the system. Sense of agency is a phenomenon from cognitive [...]
Artificial Intelligence in Support of Emergency Care in the Field
Abstract: Medical emergencies demand rapid and accurate interventions to save lives. Severe injuries often require surgical care within the first 60 minutes when timely action significantly improves survival rates. However, limited resources, remote locations, and unpredictable conditions often obstruct access to advanced medical care during this critical period. This thesis focuses on developing a medical [...]
Efficient Synthetic Data Generation and Utilization for Action Recognition and Universal Avatar Generation
Abstract: Human-centered computer vision technology relies heavily on large, diverse datasets, but collecting data from human subjects is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and raises privacy concerns. To address these challenges, researchers are increasingly using synthetic data to augment real-world datasets. This thesis explores efficient methods for generating and utilizing synthetic data to train human-based computer vision models. [...]
Multi-Resolution Informative Path Planning for Small Teams of Robots
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles can increase the efficiency of information gathering applications . A key challenge is balancing the search across multiple locations of varying importance while determining the best sensing altitude, given each agent's finite operation time. In this work, we present a multi-resolution informative path planning approach for small teams of unmanned aerial [...]
Communication-Efficient Active Reconstruction using Self-Organizing Gaussian Mixture Models
Abstract: For the multi-robot active reconstruction task, this thesis proposes using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) as the map representation that enables multiple downstream tasks: high-fidelity static scene reconstruction, communication-efficient map sharing, and safe informative planning. A new method called Self-Organizing Gaussian mixture modeling (SOGMM) is proposed that estimates the model complexity (i.e., number of Gaussian [...]
RI Faculty Business Meeting
Meeting for RI Faculty. Agenda was sent via a calendar invite.
From Lab to Launch
Bio: Nathan Michael is Shield AI’s Chief Technology Officer and a former Associate Research Professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). At CMU, Nathan was the Director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab, a research lab dedicated to improving the performance and reliability of artificially intelligent and autonomous systems that operate in [...]
Vision-Language Models for Hand-Object Interaction Prediction
Abstract: How can we predict future interaction trajectories of human hands in a scene given high-level colloquial task specifications in the form of natural language? In this paper, we extend the classic hand trajectory prediction task to two tasks involving explicit or implicit language queries. Our proposed tasks require extensive understanding of human daily activities [...]