Self-Aware Helicopters: A New Era for Vertical Flight
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Lyle specializes in perception systems for flying vehicles of all sizes. He has worked as a Research Engineer at the CMU Field Robotics Center for the past five years. He has also worked on perception and mobility systems for robots at JPL and IBM. At Caltech, he completed a B.S. in [...]
A Biologically Grounded Approach to Science Autonomy
Event Location: NSH 3002Abstract: As we reach out to explore the universe time, distance, and danger compel us to use robotic proxies to conduct exploration missions. Limitations on or the absence of communications with our robotic explorers demand science autonomy. While exploring robots will encounter stimuli that are valuable for completing mission objectives. Robotic explorers [...]
Mechanical Manipulation and Characterization of Biological Cells: A MEMS and Micro-Nanorobotics Approach
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Yu Sun is an associate professor in the Dept. of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, with joint appointments in the Inst. of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto (UofT). He is a McLean Senior Fellow at UofT and the Canada Research [...]
Graphical Models and Overlay Networks for Reasoning about Large Distributed Systems
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: This thesis examines reasoning under uncertainty in distributed systems. Unlike in centralized systems, where the observations reside in a single location, the observations in distributed systems are often scattered across the network. To reason accurately, a networked device often needs to incorporate observations from other nodes and must do so with [...]
Mission control of autonomous vehicles based on time logic framework
Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Dr. Bassi is an engineer, researcher, entrepreneur and consultant with a broad experience in automation and business intelligence areas. He graduated from Universidad de Chile (BSc EE, PEE and MSc EE) and University of Southern California (PhD Computer Science). He has held academic positions at the U. of Chile (Dept. Industrial [...]
Online Learning Techniques for Improving Robot Navigation in Unfamiliar Domains
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Many mobile robot applications require robots to act safely and intelligently in complex unfamiliar environments with little structure and limited or unavailable human supervision. As a robot is forced to operate in an environment that it was not engineered or trained for, various aspects of its performance will inevitably degrade. Roboticists [...]
Hippocampal Representations and the Learning of Cognitive Maps
Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Understanding how neural circuits in the brain enable complex, flexible behavior is now a tangible endeavor. This has in large part been made possible by the ability to record from neurons in mammals, such as rats and monkeys, as the animals are performing a behavioral task. One can then ask how [...]
Towards Simulation-Based Computational Synthesis of Robot Behaviors and Structures
Event Location: 1305 Newell-Simon HallBio: Dr. Satyandra K. Gupta is a Professor in Mechanical Engineering Department and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also director of the Maryland Robotics Center. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he was a Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute at [...]