Title: Automatic detection of human affective behavior in dyadic conversations Abstract: Emotion is communicated through face, voice, and body motion in interpersonal contexts. Yet, most approaches to automatic detection emphasize a single modality (especially face or voice), ignore social context, and focus on well-defined signs of emotion (e.g., smile).  This thesis addresses multimodal, interpersonal emotion [...]

Title: Structured Representations for Behaviors of Autonomous Robots   Abstract: Autonomous robot behavior can be captured in many ways: as code, as modules of code, in an unstructured form such as a neural net, or in one of several more structured formats such as a graph, table, or tree. This talk explores structured representations that [...]

Title: Vision and Improved Learned-Trajectory Replay for Assistive-Feeding and Food-Plating Robots   Abstract: Food manipulation offers an interesting frontier for robotics research because of the direct application of this research to real-world problems and the challenges involved in robust manipulation of deformable food items. In this talk, we focus on the challenges associated with robots manipulating [...]

Title: Leveraging Multimodal Sensory Data for Robust Cutting   Abstract: Cutting food is a challenging task due to the variety of material properties across food items. In addition, different events occur during the slicing process that need to be monitored and detected for robust execution, such as when a knife has completely cut through a [...]

Title: Toward Safe Reinforcement Learning in the Real World   Abstract: Control for mobile robots in slippery, rough terrain at high speeds is difficult. One approach to designing controllers for complex, non-uniform dynamics in unstructured environments is to use model-free learning-based methods. However, these methods often lack the necessary notion of safety which is needed [...]

Title: Data-Efficient Stage Classification and Failure Detection for Robotic Screwdriving   Abstract: Screwdriving is one of the most common assembly methods, yet its full automation is still challenging, especially for small screws. A critical reason is that existing techniques perform poorly in process monitoring and failure prediction. In addition, most solutions are essentially data-driven, thereby [...]

Title: Environment Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning Abstract: A key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. In this work, we propose the ``Environment-Probing'' Interaction (EPI) policy, which allows the agent [...]

Title: Human Torso Pose Forecasting for the Real World   Abstract: Anticipatory human intent modeling is important for robots operating alongside humans in dynamic or crowded environments. Humans often telegraph intent through posture cues, such as torso or head cues. In this paper, we describe a computationally lightweight approach to human torso pose recovery and forecasting [...]

Title: Object-level visual SLAM for plant modeling   Abstract: A 3D model that can capture the finer details of the plant structure as well as the overall field statistics, plays an important role in automating agriculture. However, modeling and mapping an agricultural field is challenging due to dynamics, illumination conditions and limited texture inherent in an outdoor environment. We propose a pipeline that combines the recent [...]

Title: Behavior planning at roundabouts   About the talk: Roundabouts or traffic circles represent a significant portion of unsignalized intersections commonly found in urban and rural roads and pose a specific challenge for autonomous or self-driving cars. In this work, we present model-free techniques that allow a self-driving car to navigate a roundabout safely.  We [...]

Title: Towards retinal membrane peeling with a handheld robotic instrument   Abstract: Vitreoretinal surgery procedures demand high precision and have to be performed with limited visualization and access. One such procedure is membrane peeling, which involves peeling of the 5-10 µm thick internal limiting membrane around macular holes. Using virtual fixtures in conjunction with robotic [...]

Title: Spatiotemporal Modeling using Recurrent Neural Processes   Abstract: Spatiotemporal processes, such as temperature in an area, motion of a vehicle, etc., depend on the spatial features of the underlying phenomena as well as time. Developing models that can estimate both mean and uncertainty associated with the prediction is important for building robust systems capable of [...]

Title: Localization and Active Exploration in Indoor Underwater Environments Abstract: Autonomous underwater vehicles have the potential to inspect and map indoor underwater environments, such as spent nuclear fuel pools and ship ballast tanks. Towards this, the thesis makes contributions in the domains of visual localization and active SLAM for underwater environments. In the first work, [...]

Title: Multi-Sensor Fusion for Robust Simultaneous Localization and Mapping   Abstract:  Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) consists of the estimation of the state of the robot, and the reconstruction of the surrounding environment simultaneously. Over the last few decades, numerous state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms are proposed and frequently utilized in the robotics community. However, a SLAM algorithm [...]

Title: State Estimation for Legged Robots using Proprioceptive Sensors   Abstract:  Mobile robots need good estimates of their state to perform closed-loop control in structured and unstructured environments. A number of existing algorithms rely on data fusion from multiple sensors to compute these estimates. This work focuses on state estimation using sensors which only measure [...]

Title: Leveraging Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning for contact and non-contact based plant phenotyping.     Abstract:  Effective plant breeding requires scientists to find correspondences between genetic markers and desirable physical traits (phenotypes) of the genotype. Robotics can aid the acceleration of breeding pipeline by facilitating high throughput plant phenotyping. In this thesis we propose [...]

Title: Active Sampling for Planetary Rover Exploration Abstract: Planetary Robotics research has expanded beyond simply developing robust navigation strategies for rovers to providing them with the capability of performing intelligent actions so as to develop a better interpretation and understanding of the environment. This will become essential in the future, when rovers explore regions far [...]

Title:  Efficient Planning for High-Speed MAV Flight in Unknown Environments Using Sparse Topological Graphs   Abstract: Safe high-speed autonomous navigation for MAVs in unknown environments requires fast planning to enable the robot to adapt and react quickly to incoming information about obstacles within the world.  Furthermore, when operating in environments not known a priori, the robot [...]

Title: Recognizing Tiny Faces Abstract: Objects are naturally captured over a continuous range of distances, causing dramatic changes in appearance, especially at low resolutions. Recognizing such small objects at range is an open challenge in object recognition. In this paper, we explore solutions to this problem by tackling the fine-grained task of face recognition. State-of-the-art embeddings [...]