Fingered robot hands are complicated systems made of three essential system components: its morphology, its actuation, and its software control. These system components are tightly coupled to each other. Due to this, it is hard to benchmark robot hand performance in a way to understand the contributions of the individual...
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...
Multi-robot teams offer promising solutions for many long term deployments in remote and dangerous domains, such as extraterrestrial or underseas exploration. However, long term deployments present many problems preventing robot teams from operating effectively. Learning over long time scales is makes it difficult to assign credit to robots' actions, as...
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...
This dissertation presents novel, field-activated smart material systems for the actuation and control of autonomous robots. Smart materials, a type of material whose properties can be changed with an external stimuli, represent a promising direction to expand upon existing robotic control and actuation methods, particularly in the sub-fields of soft...
Robotic Bipedal locomotion holds the potential for efficient, robust traversal of difficult terrain. The difficulty lies in the dynamics of locomotion which complicate control and motion planning. Bipedal locomotion dynamics are dimensionally large problems, extremely nonlinear, and operate on the limits of actuator capabilities, which limit the performance of generic...
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...
As bipedal robots move ever closer to being integrated into all manner of real world envi-ronments there is a necessity to push their dynamic capabilities to meet or exceed those of humans and animals. Advancements must be made to address ordinary challenges that arise everyday in the same environments that...