Unmanned Aircraft Research at the DLR Institute of Flight Systems – Current Research and Future Challenges
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Joerg Dittrich is a research scientist and a department head at DLR Braunschweig. DLR is the primary German government funded research organization in the field of aerospace engineering as well as the German space agency, employing around 7000 people across multiple sites in Germany. During his first years at DLR he [...]
Strategies for General Recognition
Event Location: NSH 3305Bio: Derek Hoiem is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and completed a Beckman Postgraduate Fellowship in 2008. Derek's research in visual scene understanding and object recognition has been recognized with an ACM [...]
Representation, Planning, and Learning of Dynamic Ad Hoc Robot Teams
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Forming an effective multi-robot team to perform a task is a key problem in many domains. The performance of a multi-robot team depends on the robots the team is composed of, where each robot has different capabilities. Team performance has previously been modeled as the sum of single-robot capabilities, and these [...]
Data-Driven Geometric Scene Understanding
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In this thesis, we describe a data-driven approach to leverage repositories of 3D models for scene understanding. Our ability to relate what we see in an image to a large collection of 3D models allows us to transfer information from these models, creating a rich understanding of the scene. We develop [...]
Towards Autonomous Control of Snake Robots
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Snake robots are ideally suited to highly confined environments because their small cross-sections and highly redundant kinematics allow them to enter and move through tight spaces with a high degree of dexterity. Despite these theoretical advantages, snake robots also pose a number of practical challenges that have limited their usefulness in [...]
ATHLETE – A Space Robot for Large Payloads
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Brian Wilcox is the manager of Space Robotics Technology in the Solar System Exploration Directorate and is the Principal Investigator for ATHLETE – the All-Terrain, Hex-Limbed, Extra-Terrestrial Explorer. He was the supervisor of the JPL Robotic Vehicles Group for over 20 years, during which the group was responsible for planetary rover [...]
Shape for Contact
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Given a desired function for an effector, what is its appropriate shape? This thesis addresses the problem of designing the shape of a rigid end effector to perform a given manipulation task. It presents three main contributions: First, it describes the kinematics of an effector as the combination of both its [...]
Small Image Sensors and Big Visual Data
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Li Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin. His research is in the areas of computer vision and graphics. He received his B.E. in Automation at Tsinghua University, P. R. China, and his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of [...]