Biomimetic Millirobots
Event Location: Mauldin Auditorium (NSH 1305)Bio: Ronald Fearing is a professor in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Univ. of California, Berkeley, which he joined in Jan. 1988. He was Vice-Chair for Undergraduate Matters from 2000-2006. His current research interests are in micro robotics, including flying and crawling micro-robots, parallel nanograsping (gecko [...]
Corridor View: Making Indoor Life Easier with Large Image Database
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Hongwen Henry Kang is currently a PhD student in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, co-advised by Takeo Kanade and Martial Hebert, he also works closely with Alexei A. Efros. His research interests are in the intersection of Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Computer Graphics, with specific interest in [...]
Characterization and Control of a Hopping Robot with Omni-Orientational Mobility for Rough Terrain
Event Location: NSH 1109Bio: Bryan is a Masters student in the Robotics Institute. He is conducting his thesis research at the National Robotics Engineering Center under the guidance of Dr. Dimi Apostolopoulos and plans to graduate in December 2009. His interests include mobile robot system design, design of mechanisms for controllability, and control for unique [...]
Illuminating Water Drops
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Water drops are present throughout our daily lives. Microscopic droplets create fog and mist, and large drops fall as rain. 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 [...]
Rhythmic Human-Robot Social Interaction
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Social scientists have identified and begun to describe rhythmic and synchronous properties of human social interaction. However, social interactions with robots are often stilted due to temporal mismatch between the behaviors, both verbal and nonverbal, of the interacting partners. This thesis brings the theory of interactional synchrony to bear on the [...]
3D Reconstruction and Tracking of Anatomical Structures from Endoscopic Images
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Endoscopy is attracting increasing attention for its role in minimally invasive, computer-assisted and tele-surgery. Analyzing images from endoscopes to obtain meaningful information about anatomical structures such as their 3D shapes, deformations and appearances, is crucial to such surgical applications. However, 3D reconstruction from endoscopic images is challenging due to the small [...]
Principled Search Space Design
Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Abstract: Motion planning and navigation of outdoor mobile robots has received a lot of attention in the last thirty years, yet today it still remains a challenging problem. Among the many reasons, three stand out. First, most physical mobility systems feature differential constraints that render the coupling between the control [...]
Realtime Contextual Trajectory Set Generation for Local Area Motion Planning
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Robotic motion planning is known to be an NP Hard problem. Many real-world applications employ hierarchical planning to decompose a complex problem into a set of sub-problems, each addressed by a sub-planner that makes different trade-offs and assumptions. To achieve scalability, long-range planners such as D* simplify the robot’s motion model, [...]
Does Touch Perform Fourier Analysis? – A Frequency-Domain Analysis of Haptic Gratings
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Hong Z. Tan is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering with courtesy appointments in mechanical engineering and psychological sciences at Purdue University. Her research of haptic human-machine interfaces focuses on haptic perception and its implications for engineering applications. She received her Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao [...]