Multi-Granularity Steering for Human Actions: Motion, Pose and Intention
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Katerina Fragkiadaki is a Ph.D. student in Computer and Information Science in the University of Pennsylvania. She received her diplomat in Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens. She works on tracking, segmentation and pose estimation of people under close interactions, for understanding their actions and intentions. She also [...]
Graphical Methods for Mapping Underground Environments
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: James Lee is a Masters student at the Robotics Institute developing algorithms to map subterranean spaces. He received his Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011.Abstract: Robots are the perfect matches for the dull, dangerous, and dirty job of mining. Recent advances in robotics have enabled [...]
Visual Material Recognition
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Ko Nishino is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Drexel University. He received a B.E. and an M.E. in Information and Communication Engineering in 1997 and 1999, respectively, and a PhD in Computer Science in 2002, all from The University of Tokyo. Before joining Drexel University in [...]
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 [...]