PhD Thesis Defense
Matthew Klingensmith
Carnegie Mellon University

Tracking and Calibrating Articulated Robots using SLAM Techniques

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Robots still struggle with everyday manipulation tasks. An overriding problem with robotic manipulation is uncertainty in the robot's state and calibration parameters. Small amounts of uncertainty can lead to complete task failure. This thesis explores ways of tracking and calibrating noisy robot arms using computer vision, with an aim toward making [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
John Walker
Tohoku University

Rovers for Exploring Lunar Pits and Caves

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: John Walker completed his aerospace PhD at Tohoku University in 2016. His Mechanical Engineering degree was earned at the University of Alberta in 2005. In 2010 he attended the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. This was followed by an internship at the Space Robotics Lab at Tohoku University in Japan [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
David Ford Fouhey
Carnegie Mellon University

Factoring Scenes into 3D Structure and Style

Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: Given a single image of a scene, humans have few issues answering questions about its 3D structure like “is this facing upwards?” even though mathematically speaking this should be impossible. We have similarly have few issues accounting for this 3D structure in answering viewpoint independent questions like ``is this the same [...]

VASC Seminar
Ed Johns
Dyson Fellow
Imperial College London

Deep Learning for Robot Manipulation via Simulation

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Ed Johns is a Dyson Fellow at Imperial College London, working on computer vision, robotics and machine learning. He received a BA and MEng from Cambridge University, followed by a PhD in visual recognition and localisation from Imperial College London. After post-doctoral work at University College London, he then [...]

VASC Seminar
Xavier Alameda
Postdoctoral, Multimodal Human Understanding Group
University of Trento

Matrix Completion: A vision-oriented perspective

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Xavier Alameda-Pineda received the M.Sc. degree in mathematics and telecommunications engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech in 2008 and 2009 respectively, the M.Sc. degree in computer science from the Université Joseph Fourier and Grenoble INP in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics/computer science from the [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Grace Xingxin Gao
Assistant Professor
Aerospace Engineering Department University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Navigating Unmanned Aerials Vehicles at Low Altitude: Accuracy, Reliability and Security

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Grace Xingxin Gao is an assistant professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the GPS Laboratory at Stanford University in 2008. Before joining Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an assistant professor in 2012, Prof. Gao was a research [...]

VASC Seminar
Karteek Alahari
Researcher
Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes Center

What can we do with motion cues?

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Karteek Alahari is an Inria permanent researcher (chargé de recherche) since October 2015. He has been at Inria since 2010, initially as a postdoctoral fellow in the WILLOW team in Paris, and then on a starting research position in Grenoble since September 2013. Dr. Alahari's PhD from Oxford Brookes [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Samuel Yim

Rover Localization in Sparsely-Featured Environments

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Samuel Yim is an M.S. student in the Robotics Institute advised by David Wettergreen. He received a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College in 2014. His current research focuses on robustly detecting and describing features for SLAM applications.Abstract: Autonomous outdoor localization is a challenging but important task for rovers. This [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Bastian Schurmann

Convex Interpolation Control with Formal Guarantees for Disturbed and Constrained Nonlinear Systems

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Bastian Schürmann is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Robotics and Embedded Systems at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. There he works in the Cyber-Physical Systems group with Professor Matthias Althoff. His research focuses on obtaining controllers with high performance and formal guarantees for safety-critical systems. This is achieved [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Humphrey Hu
Carnegie Mellon University

In-Field Parameter Selection for Perception Context Adaptation

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: Perception and state estimation are critical robot competencies that remain difficult to harden and generalize. This is due in part to the incredible complexity of modern perception systems which are commonly comprised of dozens of components with hundreds of parameters overall. Selecting a configuration of parameters relies on a human's understanding [...]