Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/7518832261 Title: System Design, Modelling, and Control for an Off-Road Autonomous Ground Vehicle Abstract: Autonomy in passenger road vehicles has long been a goal for many research groups and companies, and there has been a significant amount of focus on achieving this endeavour. A lesser focused upon area is the task of precise autonomous [...]

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/5523238059   Title: Robust Instance Tracking via Uncertainty Flow   Abstract: Current state-of-the-art trackers often fail due to distractors and large object appearance changes. In this work, we explore the use of dense optical flow to improve tracking robustness. Our main insight is that, because flow estimation can also have errors, we need [...]

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/8978517404 Title: Visual Assessment for Non-Disruptive Object Extraction Abstract: Robots operating in human environments need to perform a variety of dexterous manipulation tasks on object arrangements that have complex physical support relationships, e.g. procuring utensils from a large pile of dishes, grabbing a bottle from a stuffed fridge, or fetching a book from a loaded [...]

Location: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/98262481359?pwd=dnN4UERmQlF6dVVROTQ1czYrU215UT09 Title: Efficient Multiresolution Scrolling Grid for MAV Obstacle Avoidance Abstract: In this talk, we propose the use of an efficient, structured multiresolution representation for robot mapping and planning.  We focus on expanding the sensor range of dense local grids for memory-constrained platforms.  While multiresolution data structures have been proposed previously, we avoid processing [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/3388909661 Title: On-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Learning to Drive in Urban Settings Abstract: Traditional autonomous vehicle pipelines that follow a modular approach have been very successful in the past both in academia and industry, which has led to autonomy deployed on road. Though this approach provides ease of interpretation, its generalizability to unseen [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93391276533?pwd=RTM4NTc0cTJETmRudGcwenNCSVgzdz09 Title: Wind-Field Estimation and Curvature Continuous Path Planning for Low Altitude Urban Aerial Mobility Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in dense urban areas need the ability to generate wind-aware collision-free, smooth, dynamically feasible trajectories between two locations. The complex and high-rise structure of the modern urban landscape affects the wind flow [...]

Where?:https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96355036481?pwd=OCtBeWZpMnZsZzFlRkJWc2dkZW5qUT09   Title: Discrete Communication Learning via Backpropagation for Distributed Computing on Bandwidth-Limited Communication Networks   Abstract: Efficient inter-agent communication is an important requirement for both cooperative multi-agent robotics tasks, as well as distributed computing.  In both of these domains, the rate at which information can be transferred between robots or computing nodes is often [...]

Zoom Link:https://cmu.zoom.us/j/3399055387 Title: Applications of Deep Learning for Robotic Agriculture.   Abstract: Agricultural automation is a varied and challenging field, with tasks ranging from detection to sizing and from manipulation to navigation. These are also precursors to effective plant breeding and management. Making plant measurements by manually scouting is labor-intensive and intractable at large scale. [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/4937138807   Title: Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving   Abstract: Modern autonomous driving systems continue to face the challenges of handling complex and variable multi-agent real-world scenarios. Some subsystems, such as perception, use deep learning-based approaches to leverage large amounts of data to generalize to novel scenes. Other subsystems, such as planning [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93097644031?pwd=RzZVSXEvdE5zZ0RDaU9FdmRUMU1vQT09 Title: Accurate Orientation Estimates for Deep Inertial Odometry Abstract: Many smartphone applications use inertial measurement units (IMUs) to sense movement, but the use of these sensors for pedestrian localization can be challenging due to their noise characteristics. Recent deep inertial odometry approaches to pedestrian navigation have demonstrated the increasing feasibility of inertial navigation. However, [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/6056258382   Title: Search-Based Planning with Extend Operator   Abstract: Sampling-based approaches are often favored in robotics for high-dimensional motion planning for their fast coverage of the search space. However, at best they offer asymptotic guarantees on completeness and solution quality, and returned paths are typically unpredictable due to their inherent stochasticity. By [...]

Location: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96696044200?pwd=MVl4aUpiZlYvYlRwRmF1SVBUeGx6Zz09   Title: On-the-fly Targetless Extrinsics Calibration For Multi-Stereo Systems Without Field-of-View Overlap Abstract: In this talk, we propose an on-the-fly extrinsics calibration method for stereo pairs lacking overlapping field of view that is robust to visual odometry errors. Multi-stereo systems are becoming increasingly popular because of their large field of view (FoV) that benefits [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/9608506704   Title: Towards Geometric Motion Planning for 3-link Kinematic Systems   Abstract: Geometric mechanics offers a powerful mathematical framework for studying locomotion for mobile systems. Despite the well-established literature, challenges remain when using geometric mechanics to design gaits for robots made of multi-link chain; in this thesis, we look at two of them. First, [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/93803046130?pwd=dE5LU21lakcxNjBmZ0EvVDdNOWswdz09   Title: Learning Families of Behaviors for Legged Locomotion using Model-Free Deep Reinforcement Learning   Abstract: Conventional planning and control of highly articulated legged robots is challenging because of the high dimensionality of the state space, and such conventional techniques normally produce a single point solution. In this work, we present a [...]

Location: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96923127678?pwd=TWt3Zk5neFUzSlJWUjZEN2F6UVhudz09 Title: Representation Learning for Safe Autonomous Movement Abstract: Mobile robots have become an increasingly common presence in our homes and on our roads. To move safely within these shared spaces, autonomous agents must understand how other dynamic actors behave and how such behavior influences the navigability of the surrounding scene. Towards this goal, we [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/91138367616 Title: Soft Materials Architectures for Robot Manipulation Abstract: Robot manipulation has been a prolific subject of academic research for several decades - however, today's robotic manipulators have yet to demonstrate an ability to perform robust and versatile dexterous manipulation. This challenge can largely be attributed to a tradeoff between complexity and capability [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/4413360562 Title: Toward Increased Airspace Safety: Quadrotor Guidance for Targeting Aerial Objects Abstract: As the market for commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) booms, there is an increasing number of small, teleoperated or autonomous aircraft found in protected or sensitive airspace. Existing solutions for removal of these aircraft are either military-grade and too [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/95386019509?pwd=cmNnTm9lWWlNbTh1SmQ0RU5PVTBmQT09 Title: Cooperative Perception for Pairs of Self-Driving Cars   Abstract: Fully autonomous vehicles are expected to share the road with less advanced vehicles for a significant period of time. Furthermore, an increasing number of vehicles on the road are equipped with a variety of low-fidelity sensors which provide some perception and localization [...]

Zoom link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/3216213856   Title: Learning-based modular framework for environment-adaptive planning in exploration tasks   Abstract: Search-based path planning has spawned a number of different solutions using different paradigms and strategies, both generalized and specific to certain problems, representations, and environments. Split into heuristic and non-heuristic based approaches, where heuristic-based approaches, embedded within these approaches [...]

Location: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/99874277969?pwd=Q1MvczNhWTB4UmF3UXFOMEFtVG1uZz09 Title: Mechanics and Control of Coupled Interactions in Ambient Media Abstract: Many multi-agent systems in nature comprise agents that interact with, and respond to, the dynamics of their environment. For example, fish school based on the fundamental fluid phenomena of vortex shedding, birds shed leading-edge vortices in formation for flocking, and E. coli bacteria [...]