Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
Legged robots have consistently captured our collective imagination through various forms of media, from Hollywood films, anime, and viral Youtube videos of robots accomplishing incredible feats of acrobatics. These robots have the potential to navigate our environments, capable of completing tasks that would otherwise require human intervention. However, developing controls...
Disaster response and surveillance operations will increasingly incorporate Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)s due to their cost-effectiveness and maneuverability. This trend has driven the research on small-sized quadcopters for varying indoor applications. Small-sized quadcopters' payload and computational capacity limit the usage of complex vision-based collision avoidance algorithms that are employed by...
Successful pruning relies on accurately identifying the 3D structure of tree branches and leaders. However, this task is arduous in an agricultural setting due to the complexity of scenes, the presence of clutter, and variable weather conditions. This project addresses these challenges by leveraging advancements in 2D image segmentation and...
In recent years, model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an increasingly popular alternative to more traditional model-based or optimization-based control methods in solving robotic legged locomotion. However, deploying RL in the real world can be a significant undertaking. Constructing reward functions which compel controllers to learn the desired behavior...
This project covers the construction of a Stereo Camera System, integration with a Velodyne VLP-16 LIDAR and the creation of dataset intended to aid in the development of vision algorithms for forestry applications. This project is the first step in a future multi-stage project to implement computer vision systems for...
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
Commercial and public safety usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the National Airspace is currently restricted by federal regulation. The Federal Aeronautics Association is interested in modifying the restrictions; however, research is needed to study the human factor and required aptitude for a single human operating multiple UAVs. This Master’s...
As technologies like 3D printing increase in prevalence and capabilities, having a robot hand specifically designed for a given manipulation task also becomes more feasible. Leading to the question of how to design a robot hand for a specific manipulation task. To answer this question, I propose we need three...
We present a method for decentralized, multi-robot exploration in adverse environments where communication is minimal. A key conceptual feature of our method is enabling implicit coordination between robots by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a heuristic for planning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our method consists of...