Title: Precision UAV Landing in Unstructured Environments Abstract: The autonomous landing of a drone is an important part of autonomous flight. One way to have a high certainty of safety in landing is to return the drone to the same location it took-off from. Current implementations of the return-to-home functionality fall short when relying solely [...]

Title: Joint Surface Reconstruction from Monocular Vision and LiDAR   Abstract: In recent years, dense reconstruction gains popularity because of its broad applications in inspection, mapping, and planning. Cameras or LiDARs are generally deployed for 3D dense reconstruction. However, current reconstruction pipelines based on cameras or LiDARs have significant limitations in achieving an accurate and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]