The Design of Control Architectures for Force-controlled Humanoids Performing Dynamic Tasks
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This talk is about improving the process of designing controllers for humanoid robots. It describes tools we designed that enable us to iterate faster when experimenting with control systems that aggregate multiple model based sub-controllers. Many model based humanoid controllers can be considered approximations to a fully general, but computationally intractable, [...]
Slip Control on Extreme Slopes for a Rover with Plowing Capability
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Daniel is a Masters student at the Robotics Institute working on controlled rover descent of lunar craters. He has a Bachelors degree in Mechatronics Engineering.Abstract: Recent efforts in planetary robotic exploration aim toward craters, skylights, and other depressions with challenging terrain conditions. The access to such places requires traversing on extreme [...]
Mission Planning and Execution for the Unmanned Rotorcraft ARTIS
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Florian Adolf is a research scientist at the DLR Institute of Flight Systems in Braunschweig, Germany, where he is the group lead for mission planning and execution systems at the department of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. He joined DLR in 2005 to research automated guidance and decision making systems for use on [...]
Robot Motion for Seamless Human-Robot Collaboration
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to enable robots to produce motion that is suitable for human-robot collaboration and co-existence. Most motion in robotics is purely functional: industrial robots move to package parts, vacuuming robots move to suck dust, and personal robots move to clean up a dirty table. This type [...]
Interactive Learning for Sequential Decisions and Predictions
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Sequential prediction problems arise commonly in many areas of robotics and information processing: e.g., predicting a sequence of actions over time to achieve a goal in a control task, interpreting an image through a sequence of local image patch classifications, or translating speech to text through an iterative decoding procedure. Learning [...]
Inference Machines: Parsing Scenes via Iterated Predictions
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Extracting a rich representation of an environment from visual sensor readings can benefit many tasks in robotics, e.g., path planning, mapping, and object manipulation. While important progress has been made, it remains a difficult problem to effectively parse entire scenes, i.e., to recognize semantic objects, man-made structures, and landforms. This process [...]
Detecting Object Instances Without Discriminative Features
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: In this thesis, we study the topic of detecting object instances which lack discriminative features in scenes with severe clutter and occlusions. Our work focuses on the three key areas: (1) objects that have ambiguous features, (2) objects where discriminative point-based features cannot be reliably extracted, and (3) occlusions. Current approaches [...]
Dense non-rigid motion capture from monocular video
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Ravi Garv is a final year PhD student at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, at Queen Mary University of London, working under the supervision of Dr. Lourdes Agapito, who holds an ERC Starting Grant. His work focuses on dense reconstruction of non-rigid surfaces and dynamic scenes. Mr. Garv [...]
Jointly Aligning and Segmenting Multiple Web Photo Streams for the Inference of Collective Photo Storylines
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Gunhee Kim is a PhD candidate advised by Eric P. Xing at Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to starting PhD study in 2009, he earned a master’s degree under supervision of Martial Hebert in Robotics Institute, CMU. He also worked as a visiting student in Antonio Torralba's group [...]
Figure-Ground Segmentation and Pooling for Visual Scene Analysis
Bio: Cristian Sminchisescu is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Engineering, at Lund University. He has obtained a doctorate in computer science and applied mathematics with specialization in imagining, vision and robotics at INRIA, France, under an Eiffel excellence doctoral fellowship, and has done postdoctoral research in the Artificial intelligence Laboratory at [...]