Student Talks
Object-Centric Grounding for Deployable and Interactive Vision-Language Navigation Agents
Abstract: Robots that operate in human-centric environments must integrate perception, reasoning, and action across multiple modalities to complete tasks according to user instructions. For these robots, being able to navigate according to a natural language instruction about the environment is an important capability, which requires 3D spatial reasoning, semantic scene understanding, and the ability to [...]
Learning for dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robotic hands
Abstract: Dexterous robotic manipulation is becoming increasingly crucial as robots transition from factory manufacturing to everyday human environments such as household assistance and healthcare support. However, operating in these unstructured settings presents significant challenges in both hardware and software. Achieving adaptability across diverse tasks requires multi-fingered robotic hands with high degrees of freedom, capable of [...]
Designing Supportive Agents using the Lived Experience as a Framework for Participatory and Community-based Design to Enhance the Assistive Technology Ecosystem
Abstract In assistive robotics – a sub-discipline within the broader field of human-robot interaction (HRI) concerned with designing autonomous agents that can support people with disabilities (PWDs) – HRI designers use User-Centered Design (UCD) approaches to create assistive robots and technologies. They involve potential end-users with disabilities as a way of ensuring the end-product, that [...]
Carnegie Mellon University
Design and Validation of Minimally-Actuated Mobility for Planetary Rovers
Abstract: This thesis investigates low degree-of-freedom (DoF), minimally-actuated rover mobility architectures for planetary exploration. These platforms seek to reduce mass and complexity compared to the heritage rocker-bogie system while maintaining functional performance. The work focuses on two systems: MoonRanger, a lightweight lunar micro-rover slated for a 2029 moon mission, and Zoë2, a research rover developed [...]
Getting Optimization layers to play well with Deep Networks : Numerical methods and Architectures
Abstract: Many real-world challenges, from robotic control to resource management, can be effectively formulated as optimization problems. Recent advancements have focused on incorporating these optimization problems as layers within deep learning pipelines, enabling the explicit inclusion of auxiliary constraints or cost functions, which is crucial for applications such as enforcing physical laws, ensuring safety constraints, [...]
Scaling Laws Revisited: When Data, Not Compute, is the Bottleneck
Abstract: The formula for AI progress has long appeared straightforward: more compute, more data, better models. Yet while compute is growing with better hardware and bigger clusters, data is stagnating—calling into question the very scaling laws that powered the last decade. The internet—often described as the “fossil fuel” of AI—offers only a finite reservoir of [...]
Accessible Dexterous Manipulation with Soft Hands: Designs, Methods, Models, and the DexKit Platform
Abstract: Robot dexterity remains an open challenge in robotics that has the potential to transform manufacturing, healthcare, and daily life. Robots that safely and robustly interact with unstructured environments must combine compliant hardware with models and planners that tolerate uncertainty. Additionally, if robust robot dexterity is to be realized outside of research labs, it must [...]
Robust Incremental Distributed Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Abstract: Multi-robot teams show exceptional promise across applications like Search-and-Rescue, disaster-response, agriculture, forestry, and scientific exploration due to their ability to go where humans cannot, parallelize activity, operate robustly to failures, and expand capabilities beyond that of an individual robot. Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (C-SLAM) is a fundamental capability for these multi-robot teams as [...]
Towards 4D perception with foundational priors
Abstract: As humans, we are constantly interacting with and observing a three-dimensional dynamic world. Building this spatiotemporal or 4D understanding in vision algorithms is not straightforward as there is orders of magnitude less 4D data than 2D images and videos. This underscores the need to find meaningful ways to exploit 2D data to realize 4D [...]
Customizing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of generative models, their potential to transform creative content creation is increasingly evident. However, most large-scale generative models are primarily text-conditioned, given the availability of large-scale paired text–image datasets. In contrast, for most practical applications, creators often begin from an existing asset and wish to generate variations or modify it in [...]