Vision-Based Control of a Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Retinal Surgery
Event Location: GHC 8102Abstract: Surgeons increasingly need to perform complex operations on extremely small anatomy. Many promising new surgeries are effective, but difficult or impossible to perform because humans lack the extraordinary control required at sub-mm scales. Using micromanipulators, surgeons gain better positioning accuracy and additional dexterity as the instrument smoothes tremor and scales hand [...]
Generating Representations for Action Recognition From Coarsely Labeled and Synthetic Data
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Action recognition techniques rely heavily on well chosen features, such as trajectory-based motion descriptors, to make the most of relatively scarce video training data. Typically these features must be hand-selected because the very paucity of suitably annotated data that makes the selection of features critical also restricts the degree to which [...]
Constrained Manipulation Planning
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: For robots to be useful in our homes they must be able to interact with our everyday environments and obey constraints on their motion. This thesis focuses on manipulation planning algorithms, which use search and optimization to quickly compute trajectories that allow a robot to interact with its environment. Planning for [...]
Light and Water Drops
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Water drops are present throughout our daily lives. Because of their shape and refractive properties, water drops exhibit a wide variety of visual effects. If not directly illuminated by a light source, then they are difficult to see. But if they are directly illuminated, they can become the brightest objects in [...]
Push Recovery Control for Force-Controlled Humanoid Robots
Event Location: GHC 6115Abstract: Humanoid robots represent the state of the art in complex robot systems, but the design of controllers can be challenging and tedious. High performance controllers that can handle unknown perturbations will be required if complex robots are to one day interact safely with people in everyday environments. The high degree of [...]
Assessing the Impact of Visual Utility Based Camera Control
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Complex visual tasks often require high resolution imagery of specific phenomena but run too slowly to process large fields of view. In this thesis, we explore a general technique for camera control designed to maximize the high resolution imagery captured that is useful to the given task while minimizing excess imagery [...]
Query-Specific Learning and Inference for Probabilistic Graphical Models
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: In numerous real world applications, from sensor networks to computer vision to natural text processing, one needs to reason about the system in question in the face of uncertainty. A key problem in all those settings is to compute the probability distribution over the variables of interest (the query) given the [...]
On the Fundamental Relationships Among Path Planning Alternatives
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Robotic motion planning aspires to match the ease and efficiency with which humans move through and interact with their environment. Yet state of the art robotic planners fall short of human abilities; they are slower in computation, and the results are often of lower quality. One stumbling block in traditional motion [...]
Graph-based Trajectory Planning through Programming by Demonstration
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Autonomous robots are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry, space exploration, and even domestic applications. These diverse fields share the need for robots to perform increasingly complex motion behaviors for interacting with the world. As the robots' tasks become more varied and sophisticated, though, the challenge of programming them becomes more difficult [...]