PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Safe and Resilient Multi-Robot Systems: Heterogeneity and Human Presence

Zoom Link Abstract: In the mission of a multi-robot team, the large number of robots behave like a system that relies on networking to enable smooth information propagation and inter-robot interaction as the mission evolves in a collective fashion. Key to the success of mission operation demands for safe and reliable robot interactions within the [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Michael Tatum – MSR Thesis Talk

Archived Zoom Video Password: 1u%i4YO%   Title: Communications Coverage in Unknown Underground Environments   Abstract:In field robotics, maintaining communications between the user at a stationary basestation and all deployed robots is essential.  This task's difficulty increases when the test environment is underground and the environment is unknown to the operator and robots.  A common approach [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Brendan Miller – MSR Thesis Talk

NSH 4305

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96617143856 Title: IBB-Net: Fast Iterative Bounding Box Regression for Point Clouds Abstract: Currently, most point cloud based detection pipelines are focused on producing high accuracy results while requiring significant computational resources and a high-end GPU. Our research explores how to reduce the computational overhead by improving a key element of detection: bounding box regression. We [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Interactive Weak Supervision – Learning Useful Heuristics for Data Labeling

Zoom Link Abstract: Obtaining large annotated datasets is critical for training successful machine learning models and it is frequently a bottleneck in practice. Weak supervision offers a promising alternative for producing labeled datasets without ground truth annotations by generating probabilistic labels using multiple noisy heuristics. This process can scale to large amounts of data and [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Automated Action Selection and Embodied Simulation for Socially Assistive Robots using Standardized Interactions

Zoom Link Abstract: Robots have the tremendous potential of assisting people in their lives, allowing them to achieve goals that they would not be able to achieve by themselves. In particular, socially assistive robots provide assistance primarily through social interaction, in healthcare, therapy, and education contexts. Despite their potential, current socially assistive robots still lack [...]

VASC Seminar
Bryan Russell
Senior Research Scientist
Adobe Research

Telling Left from Right: Learning Spatial Correspondence Between Sight and Sound

Virtual VASC Seminar:  https://cmu.zoom.us/j/92741882813?pwd=R1R0eGRaeXFHTEF2VWNwY2VIZmU5Zz09 Abstract:  Self-supervised audio-visual learning aims to capture useful representations of video by leveraging correspondences between visual and audio inputs. Existing approaches have focused primarily on matching semantic information between the sensory streams. In my talk, I’ll describe a novel self-supervised task to leverage an orthogonal principle: matching spatial information in the [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Heuristics for routing and scheduling of Spatio-Temporal type problems in industrial environments

Zoom Link Abstract: Spatio-temporal problems are fairly common in industrial environments. In practice, these problems come with different characteristics and are often very hard to solve optimally. So practitioners prefer to develop heuristics that exploit mathematical structure specific to the problem for obtaining good performance. In this proposal, I will present work on heuristics for [...]

MSR Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Aditya Agarwal – MSR Thesis Talk

Zoom Link:  https://cmu.zoom.us/j/3276236755   Title: Fast and High-Quality GPU-based Deliberative Perception for Object Pose Estimation Abstract:  Pose estimation of known objects is fundamental to tasks such as robotic grasping and manipulation. The need for reliable grasping imposes stringent accuracy requirements on pose estimation in cluttered, occluded scenes in dynamic environments. Existing methods either require large sets of [...]

PhD Speaking Qualifier
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Learning Active Task-Oriented Exploration Policies for Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap

Zoom Link Abstract: Training robotic policies in simulation suffers from the sim-to-real gap, as simulated dynamics can be different from real-world dynamics. Past works tackled this problem through domain randomization and online system-identification. The former is sensitive to the manually-specified training distribution of dynamics parameters and can result in behaviors that are overly conservative. The [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Understanding, Exploiting and Improving Inter-view Relationships

 Zoom Link Abstract: Multi-view machine learning has received substantial attention in various applications over recent years. These applications typically involve learning on data obtained from multiple sources of information, such as, for example, in multi-sensor systems such as self-driving cars and patient bed-side monitoring. Learning models for such applications can often benefit from leveraging not [...]