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 [...]
Modeling Closed-Loop Adaptive Systems
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are a powerful class of assistive devices that may one day restore movement ability to paralyzed individuals. These devices act by creating a direct mapping between recorded neural activity and the movement of an external actuator, like a computer cursor or a robotic arm, bypassing defective neural transmission [...]
Direct SLAM and 3D Reconstruction in real-time
Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Jakob Engel received his Bachelor degree in Computer Science in 2009 and his Master degree in December 2011 at the Technical University of Munich (Germany). He received the SIEMENS Award for the best Master's Thesis 2012 for his work on Autonomous Camera-Based Navigation of a Quadrocopter. Since September 2012 he is [...]
Weakly supervised learning from images and videos
Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Cordelia Schmid holds a M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and a Doctorate, also in Computer Science, from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG). Her doctoral thesis on "Local Greyvalue Invariants for Image Matching and Retrieval" received the best thesis award from INPG in 1996. She [...]
Weakly Supervised Video Understanding
Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: This talk addresses the problem of understanding the visual content of videos using a weak form of supervision such as the textual information available in television or film scripts. I will discuss two instances of this problem, the joint localization and identification of movie characters and their actions, and the assignment [...]
Robust Manipulation via Contact Sensing
Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Humans effortlessly manipulate objects in cluttered and uncertain environments. In contrast, most robotic manipulators are limited to carefully engineered environments, e.g. factories, to circumvent the difficulty of manipulation under uncertainty. Contact sensors can provide robots with with the feedback vital to addressing this limitation. However, there are three principal challenges to [...]