Separation Anxiety: Sending Large Robots to Work on Their Own
Event Location: GHC 6115Bio: Sarjoun graduated from the RI PhD program in 2007 and went on to found Bossa Nova Robotics, with a mission to put robots in people's lives. Bossa Nova designed, built and commercialized half a million robot toys, and is currently developing service applications for CMU's Ballbot.Sarjoun leads the development of Bossa [...]
Learning a Context-Dependent Switching Strategy for Robust Visual Odometry
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Kristen Holtz is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute advised by Dr. Sebastian Scherer. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Control and Dynamical Systems from California Institute of Technology in 2013. Her current research focuses on increasing robustness to unanticipated faults and failures, with the [...]
Integrating Image Clustering and Codebook Learning
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Pengtao Xie is a graduate student in the Language Technologies Institute, working with Professor Eric Xing. His primary research interests lie in latent space models and large scale distributed machine learning. He received a M.E. from Tsinghua University in 2013 and a B.E. from Sichuan University in 2010. He is the [...]
Correcting Regions of Inaccurate Modeling for Online Performance Improvement
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: To make intelligent decisions, robots often use models of the effects of their actions on the world. Unfortunately, in complex environments, it is often infeasible to create models that are accurate in every plausible situation, which can lead to suboptimal performance. In these cases, online correction of model inaccuracies can lead [...]
Environment Model Compression for Autonomous Exploration
Event Location: NSH 3305Bio: Erik Nelson is an M.S. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Dr. Nathan Michael. He received a B.S. in materials engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in 2013. His research interests lie at the intersection of robotic mapping, perception, and exploration.Abstract: This talk will focus [...]
Handheld Micromanipulator for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robot-assisted surgery has been increasingly adopted in a wide variety of surgical applications because it offers fine manipulation with high precision and dexterity. Despite the commercial success of robotic platforms, practical use in microsurgery is still challenging due to a considerable level of accuracy required at sub-millimeter scales. Limited visualization and [...]
Flight Testing of an Unmanned Aircraft System – A Research Perspective
Event Location: GCH 2109Bio: 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 [...]
Forecasting Human Motion in Social Situations
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: The goal of this thesis is to further our understanding of nonverbal communication by developing methods and representations to quantify and predict human body motion during social interactions. We design a data collection protocol and capture system to obtain 3D body pose and facial annotations for groups of interacting people engaged [...]