PhD Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Moving Lights and Cameras for Better 3D Perception of Indoor Scenes

GHC 6501

Abstract: Decades of research on computer vision have highlighted the importance of active sensing -- where an agent controls the parameters of the sensors to improve perception. Research on active perception in the context of robotic manipulation has demonstrated many novel and robust sensing strategies involving a multitude of sensors like RGB and RGBD cameras [...]

RI Seminar
Assistant Professor
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Building Generalist Robots with Agility via Learning and Control: Humanoids and Beyond

1403 Tepper School Building

Abstract: Recent breathtaking advances in AI and robotics have brought us closer to building general-purpose robots in the real world, e.g., humanoids capable of performing a wide range of human tasks in complex environments. Two key challenges in realizing such general-purpose robots are: (1) achieving "breadth" in task/environment diversity, i.e., the generalist aspect, and (2) [...]

VASC Seminar
Christian Richardt
Research Scientist Lead
Meta Reality Labs Research

High-Fidelity Neural Radiance Fields

3305 Newell-Simon Hall

Abstract: I will present three recent projects that focus on high-fidelity neural radiance fields for walkable VR spaces: VR-NeRF (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023) is an end-to-end system for the high-fidelity capture, model reconstruction, and real-time rendering of walkable spaces in virtual reality using neural radiance fields. To this end, we designed and built a custom multi-camera rig to [...]

RI Seminar
Anirudha Majumdar
Associate Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

Robots That Know When They Don’t Know

1403 Tepper School Building

Abstract: Foundation models from machine learning have enabled rapid advances in perception, planning, and natural language understanding for robots. However, current systems lack any rigorous assurances when required to generalize to novel scenarios. For example, perception systems can fail to identify or localize unfamiliar objects, and large language model (LLM)-based planners can hallucinate outputs that [...]

Special Events

Robotics Institute Winter Party

All Robotics Institute Faculty. Staff, Students, and Visitors are invited to attend this event. Please join us for food, beverages, and casual conversation with colleagues. A calendar invite including details will be sent closer to the event.

RI Event

Robotics Institute Picnic

Please mark your calendars and plan to join us for the 2025 Robotics Institute Picnic! More information and RSVP e-vite to follow as we get closer to the event.