PhD Thesis Proposal
Christopher M. Dellin
Carnegie Mellon University

Efficient Manipulation Task Planning via Reuse-Informed Optimization of Planning Effort

Event Location: GHC 6501Abstract: In order to assist humans with dangerous or menial tasks, autonomous robots will need to act under significant time and energy constraints. At task time, the amount of effort a robot spends planning directly detracts from its total performance. Manipulation tasks, however, present challenges to efficient motion planning. They are often [...]

RI Seminar
Gabe Sibley
Assistant Professor
University of Colorado

Mobile Robot Perception for Long-term Autonomy

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Gabe Sibley is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Before joining CU, Gabe was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at George Washington University and Director of the Autonomous Robotics & Perception Lab. Previously, Gabe was a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, and [...]

VASC Seminar
Phillip Isola
PhD Student
MIT

From learning visual relationships to perceptual and cognitive organization

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Phillip Isola is a PhD student in Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, under the supervision of Ted Adelson. He studies a mix of human and computer vision.Abstract: No pixel is an island. It is connected to the rest of the visual visual by a web of similarities, associations, and other [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
Mike Phillips
Carnegie Mellon University

Experience Graphs: Leveraging Experience in Planning

Event Location: NSH 3305Abstract: Motion planning is a central problem in robotics and is crucial to finding paths to navigate and manipulate safely and efficiently. Ideally, we want planners which find paths quickly and of good quality. Additionally, planners should generate predictable motions, which are safer when operating in the presence of humans. While the [...]

Special Events

2015 National Robotics Week Celebration

Event Location: CampusAbstract: The Robotics Institute will celebrate the fifth annual National Robotics Week on April 16 & 17 with lectures, project demonstrations, the annual Mobot (mobile robot) races and a reception for RI affiliated people. April 16 12:00 - 1:30 p.m.: Teruko Yata Memorial Lecture in Robotics A School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture [...]

VASC Seminar
Ajay Divakaran
Program Director
SRI International

Comprehensive Human State Modeling and Its Applications

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Ajay Divakaran, Ph.D., is a Program Director and leads the Vision and Multi-Sensor group in SRI International’s Vision and Learning Laboratory. Divakaran is currently the principal investigator for a number of SRI research projects. His work includes multimodal modeling and analysis of affective, cognitive, and physiological aspects of human behavior, interactive [...]

Field Robotics Center Seminar
Sankalp Arora
Carnegie Mellon University

Enabling High Speed Autonomous Flights

Event Location: NSH 1507Bio: Sankalp Arora is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute advised by Sebastian Scherer. He received his B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Delhi in India in 2010. His current research focuses on exploration senor and path planning for aerial vehicles. He was research staff at FRC [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
Xuehan Xiong
Carnegie Mellon University

Supervised Descent Method

Event Location: GHC 2109Abstract: In this thesis, I aim to present a new perspective on looking at classical problems in Computer Vision. Instead of spending efforts on finding novel objective functions and improving existing optimization algorithms, I aim to demonstrate that formulating those problems as policy learning yields more flexible and efficient algorithms. Our recently [...]

VASC Seminar
Bryan Russell
Research Scientist
Adobe Research, Creative Technologies Lab

Grounding text, maps, and images to 3D geometry

Event Location: NSH 1305Bio: Bryan Russell is a Research Scientist in the Creative Technologies Lab at Adobe Research in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2008 under the supervision of Professors William T. Freeman and Antonio Torralba. He was a post-doctoral fellow from 2008-2010 [...]

RI Seminar
Sarjoun Skaff
Founder, CTO
Bossa Nova

Separation Anxiety: Sending Large Robots to Work on Their Own

Event Location: GHC 6115Bio: Sarjoun graduated from the RI PhD program in 2007 and went on to found Bossa Nova Robotics, with a mission to put robots in people's lives. Bossa Nova designed, built and commercialized half a million robot toys, and is currently developing service applications for CMU's Ballbot.Sarjoun leads the development of Bossa [...]