Object Instance Discovery and Modeling
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: This thesis tackles the problem of automatically discovering and modeling objects from a collection of images from the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) environment. I propose an approach that can discover object instances under severe clutter, occlusion, changes of view point, heterogeneity of object appearance and imperfect segmentation. The proposed approach [...]
Challenges for 100 milligram flight
Event Location: 1305 Newell Simon HallBio: Robert Wood is an Associate Professor in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Prof. Wood completed his M.S. (2001) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the U. [...]
Low-Altitude Operation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Event Location: NSH 1109Abstract: Currently deployed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on preplanned missions or teleoperation and do not actively incorporate information about obstacles, landing sites, wind, position uncertainty, and other aerial vehicles during online trajectory planning. Prior work has successfully addressed some problems such as obstacle avoidance at slow speeds, or landing at known [...]
Soft Robots for Safe Physical Human Interaction
Event Location: NSH 1507Abstract: Robots that can operate in human environments in a safe and robust manner would be of tremendous benefit to society in general, due to their immense potential as assistance providers to humans. However, robots to this day have seen limited application outside of the industrial setting in environments such as homes [...]
Understanding and Recreating Visual Appearance Under Natural Illumination
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: The appearance of an outdoor scene is determined to a great extent by the prevailing illumination conditions. However, most practical computer vision applications treat illumination more as a nuisance rather than a source of signal. In this dissertation, we suggest that we should instead embrace illumination, even in the challenging, uncontrolled [...]