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 [...]
Navigation, Guidance, and Adaptive Control Innovations for Unmanned Aircraft
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Eric N. Johnson (eric.johnson@ae.gatech.edu) is the Lockheed Martin Associate Professor of Avionics Integration, Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Tech. He received a B.S. degree from University of Washington, M.S. degrees from MIT and The George Washington University, and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, all in Aerospace Engineering. He also [...]
Multi-frame Data Association with Higher-Order Cost Functions
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Robert T. Collins received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1993. He is an associate professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The Pennsylvania State University, where he co-directs the Lab for Perception, Action and Cognition (LPAC). Prior to joining Penn [...]
Advanced Sensing and Imaging Techniques for Automated Quality Inspection of Fruits and Vegetables
Event Location: Newell-Simon Hall 1109Bio: Weilin Wang is a doctoral candidate of the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from China Agricultural University in 2002 and his M.S. degree in Biological Engineering from the University of Georgia in 2010. His current doctoral research is focused [...]
Robots that Need to Mislead: Biologically-inspired Machine Deception
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Ronald C. Arkin is Regents' Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He served as STINT visiting Professor at KTH in Stockholm, Sabbatical Chair at the Sony IDL in Tokyo, and the Robotics and AI Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse. Dr. Arkin's research interests [...]
Theory and Practice of Globally Optimal Deformation Estimation
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Nonrigid deformation modeling and estimation from images is a technically challenging task due to its nonlinear, nonconvex and high-dimensional nature. Traditional optimization procedures often rely on good initializations and give locally optimal solutions. On the other hand, learning-based methods that directly model the relationship between deformed images and their parameters either [...]
Less is More: New Visual Perspectives by Capturing Less than Meets the Eye
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: When we snap a photo with a conventional camera, we record all incident light no matter how it got there. In this talk I will discuss a new family of cameras that gives us many more degrees of freedom: these cameras record just a fraction of the light coming from a [...]