MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Bhavan Jasani – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Automatic detection of human affective behavior in dyadic conversations Abstract: Emotion is communicated through face, voice, and body motion in interpersonal contexts. Yet, most approaches to automatic detection emphasize a single modality (especially face or voice), ignore social context, and focus on well-defined signs of emotion (e.g., smile).  This thesis addresses multimodal, interpersonal emotion [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Aaron Roth – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Structured Representations for Behaviors of Autonomous Robots   Abstract: Autonomous robot behavior can be captured in many ways: as code, as modules of code, in an unstructured form such as a neural net, or in one of several more structured formats such as a graph, table, or tree. This talk explores structured representations that [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Travers Rhodes – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Vision and Improved Learned-Trajectory Replay for Assistive-Feeding and Food-Plating Robots   Abstract: Food manipulation offers an interesting frontier for robotics research because of the direct application of this research to real-world problems and the challenges involved in robust manipulation of deformable food items. In this talk, we focus on the challenges associated with robots manipulating [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Kevin Zhang – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 3305

Title: Leveraging Multimodal Sensory Data for Robust Cutting   Abstract: Cutting food is a challenging task due to the variety of material properties across food items. In addition, different events occur during the slicing process that need to be monitored and detected for robust execution, such as when a knife has completely cut through a [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal

Sensor Planning for Large Numbers of Robots

NSH 1305

Abstract: Teams of aerial sensing robots can provide valuable situational awareness to first responders during disasters and emergencies by locating victims, mapping environments, identifying hazards, and locating gas sources. While individual sensing tasks may feature a variety of goals, many tasks will be time-sensitive such as after a widespread disaster or due to imminent danger [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Edward Ahn

NSH 4305

Title: Toward Safe Reinforcement Learning in the Real World   Abstract: Control for mobile robots in slippery, rough terrain at high speeds is difficult. One approach to designing controllers for complex, non-uniform dynamics in unstructured environments is to use model-free learning-based methods. However, these methods often lack the necessary notion of safety which is needed [...]

Special Events

CMU RISS – UBTECH Workshop

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

As part of the RISS-UBTECH Workshop, UBTECH will be doing a Public Demo & Company Overview this Friday. For more information contact: Rachel Burcin or Ziqi Guo

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Courtesy Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

MSR Thesis Talk – Xianyi Cheng

NSH 4305

Title: Data-Efficient Stage Classification and Failure Detection for Robotic Screwdriving   Abstract: Screwdriving is one of the most common assembly methods, yet its full automation is still challenging, especially for small screws. A critical reason is that existing techniques perform poorly in process monitoring and failure prediction. In addition, most solutions are essentially data-driven, thereby [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Wenxuan Zhou – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 3305

Title: Environment Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning Abstract: A key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. In this work, we propose the ``Environment-Probing'' Interaction (EPI) policy, which allows the agent [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Abhijat Biswas – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Title: Human Torso Pose Forecasting for the Real World   Abstract: Anticipatory human intent modeling is important for robots operating alongside humans in dynamic or crowded environments. Humans often telegraph intent through posture cues, such as torso or head cues. In this paper, we describe a computationally lightweight approach to human torso pose recovery and forecasting [...]