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 [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Daniel Lu

Vision-Enhanced Lidar Odometry and Mapping

Event Location: GHC 2109Bio: Daniel Lu is an MS student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Prof. George Kantor. Daniel received his Bachelor's of Applied Science in Engineering Physics from the University of British Columbia in 2014. His research currently focuses on perception and pose estimation using a combination of cameras [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Hatem Alismail
Carnegie Mellon University

Direct Pose Estimation and Refinement

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: We study a fundamental question in pose estimation from vision-only video data: should the pose of a camera be determined from fixed and known correspondences? Or should correspondences be simultaneously estimated alongside the pose? Determining pose from fixed correspondences is known as feature-based, where well-established tools from projective geometry are utilized [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Vishnu R. Desaraju
Carnegie Mellon University

Safe, Efficient, and Robust Predictive Control of Constrained Nonlinear Systems

Event Location: NSH 1305Abstract: As autonomous systems are deployed in increasingly complex and uncertain environments, safe, accurate, and robust feedback control techniques are required to ensure reliable operation. Accurate trajectory tracking is essential to complete a variety of tasks, but this may be difficult if the system’s dynamics change online, e.g., due to environmental effects [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Samantha Horvath
Carnegie Mellon University

The Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Augmented Reality System (OCT-MARS): a novel device for microsurgeries

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: We describe the development and testing of the Optical Coherence Tomography Microsurgical Augmented Reality System (OCT-MARS). This system allows surgeons to view real-time medical image data as an in-situ overlay within the surgical field. There are a number of clinical applications for which real time, in situ visualization of otherwise transparent [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Heather Knight
Carnegie Mellon University

Expressive Motion for Low Degree-of-Freedom Robots


Event Location: GHC 4405Abstract: As social and collaborative robots move into everyday life, the need for algorithms enabling their acceptance becomes critical. People parse non-verbal communications intuitively, even from machines that do not look like people, thus, expressive motion is a natural and efficient way to communicate with people. This work presents a computational Expressive [...]

VASC Seminar
Hyun Soo Park
Assistant Professor, the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota

Understanding Social and Physical Interactions from First Person Cameras

Event Location: Newell Simon Hall 1507Bio: Hyun Soo Park is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of Minnesota. He is interested in understanding human visual sensorimotor behaviors from first person cameras. Prior to the UMN, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Jianbo Shi at University of Pennsylvania. [...]