MnRI Research Showcase 2023

November 17, 2023 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Morning Session: Drone Lab - 164 Shepherd Laboratories

Afternoon Session: 4th floor Walter Library

🚩Important Message: Three road closures are scheduled for the weekend of November 17–19, affecting East Bank travel. Detour signs will be posted in the affected areas. This will affect your transportation to Walter Library where the afternoon session happens. For more details visit the Parking & Transportation Services website.

For parking please use the Church Street Garage or Washington Avenue Parking ramp.

This free, all-day event will bring together students, postdocs, industry researchers, and faculty working in robotics at the U. We hope to help make up for years of missed in-person networking as a result of the pandemic. We invite faculty and students to showcase their current and past research in this event to foster collaborations.

Plenary Speaker: Henrik Christensen - UC San Diego

About the speaker:

Henrik I Christensen is the Qualcomm Chancellor's Chair of Robot Systems and the director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, and also a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Dr. Christensen was initially trained in Mechanical Engineering and worked subsequently with MAN/BW Diesel. He earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. EE degrees from Aalborg University, 1987 and 1990, respectively. Upon graduation, Dr. Christensen has participated in many international research projects across four continents. He has held positions at Aalborg University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech before joining UC San Diego. Dr. Christensen does research on robotics, with a particular emphasis on a systems perspective to the problem. Solutions must have a strong theoretical basis, a corresponding well-defined implementation, and it must be evaluated in realistic settings. There is a strong emphasis on "real systems for real applications!"

The research has involved collaborations with ABB, Electrolux, Daimler-Chrysler, KUKA, iRobot, Apple, Partek Forest, Volvo, SAIC, Boeing, GM, PSA Peugeot, BMW, Yujin, Qualcomm, ...

Dr. Christensen has published more than 400 contributions across robotics, vision and artificial intelligence. Dr. Christensen served as the Founding Chairman of EURON (1999-2006) and research coordinator for ECVision (2000-2004). He has led and participated in a many of EU projects, such as VAP, CoSy, CogVis, SMART, CAMERA, EcVision, EURON, Cogniron, and Neurobotics. He served as the PI for the CCC initiative on US Robotics. He is a Co-PI on ARL DCIST RCA, TILOS, the Robotics-VO, and several projects with industry. He was awarded the Joseph Engelberger Award 2011 and also named a Boeing Supplier of the Year 2011. He is a fellow of AAAS (2013) and IEEE (2015). He was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering (Dr. Techn. h.c.) from Aalborg University, 2014. Dr. Christensen has served / serves on the editorial board for many of the most prestigious journals in the field, incl. Intl. Jour. of Robotics Research (IJRR), Autonomous Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), and Image & Vision Computing. In addition, he serves on the editorial board of the MIT Series on Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents. He was the founding co-editor-in-chief of Trends and Foundations in Robotics.

Speakers - MnRI Faculty Session 1 (13:30 - 14:30)

Volkan Isler

Changhyun Choi

Ryan Caverly

Rui Cheng

Speakers - MnRI Faculty Session 2 (15:30 - 16:30)

Maria Gini

Rajesh Rajamani

Junaed Sattar

Karthik Desingh

Schedule:

Morning Session @ Drone Lab - 164 Shepherd Labs:

08:00 Breakfast, Check-in, Poster Setup

08:30 Welcome - Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, Joseph A. Konstan

09:00 Student Poster Session

11:30 Boston Dynamics Spot Robot Demo & Lab Tours

12:30 Lunch Break

Afternoon Session @ 4th floor of Walter Library:

13:30 MnRI Faculty Talk Session 1 (Volkan, Changhyun, Ryan, Rui)

14:30 Plenary Talk - Henrik Christensen (UC San Diego)

15:30 MnRI Faculty Talk Session 2 (Maria, Rajesh, Junaed, Karthik)

16:30 MnRI Social

Note:

Coffee, tea, and bagels will be provided as part of the breakfast.
Lunch will be provided only for the presenters and registered participants.
MnRI social will have drinks.

Venue

The research showcase will take place in two sessions.

Morning Session will be held in the Drone Lab at 164 Shepherd Laboratories - Google-Maps

Afternoon Session will be held in the 4th floor of Walter Library - Google-Maps

Poster Presentations

Houjian, Yu, PhD student in ECE, Image-driven Object Searching and Grasping
Demetrious, Kutzke, PhD student in CS&E, Robotic Detection of Single Scuba Diver Respiration Rate from Underwater Video
Alireza, Rezazadeh, PhD student in ECE, Learning Graph-Structured Representations for Robotic Manipulation
Jun-Jee, Chao, PhD student in CS&E, Pose Registration for Robotics Planning
Qingyuan, Jiang, PhD student in CS&E, Map-Aware Human Pose Prediction for Robot Follow-Ahead
Burak M, Gonultas, PhD student in CS&E, System Identification and Adaptive Control for Field Robots
Corey, Knutson, PhD student in CS&E, Adaptive Landmark Color for AUV Docking in Visually Dynamic Environments
Chelsey, Edge, PhD student in CS&E, Diver Interest via Pointing: Human-Directed Object Inspection for AUVs
Xun, Tu, PhD student in CS&E, Obstacle Removal for SPOT Robot
Sarah, Boelter, PhD student in CS&E, Autonomy in High-Risk Scenarios: A Proposal
Simanta, Barman, PhD student in CS&E, Efficient pedestrian and bicycle traffic flow estimation using mobile data sources
Sadman Sakib, Enan, PhD student in CS&E, Robotic Detection of a Human-Comprehensible Gestural Language for Underwater Multi-Human-Robot Collaboration
Chahyon, Ku, MS student in Robotics, and Ryan Diaz, Undergraduate in CS&E, Evaluating Robustness of Visual Representations for Object Assembly Task Requiring Spatio-Geometrical Reasoning
Erik, Lehner, PhD student in AEM, Robust Control of Hard Disk Drives: A Mixed H_2-H_∞-Optimal Control Approach
Sze Kwan, Cheah, PhD student in AEM, Robust control for Hypersonic flight testing
Soojeong, Lee, PhD student in AEM, Robust Cable-actuated Shape Control of a Flexible Solar Sail Boom for the CABLESSail Concept
Angel, Sylvester, PhD student in CS&E, Real-time Search and Retrieval Adaptation through Evolution for Multi-robot Systems
Ross, Worobel, PhD student in CS&E, Reducing The Sim-To-Real Gap In Dextrous Robotic Manipulation
Miles, Priebe, MS student in Robotics, Tactile Diffusion Policy for Bi-Manual Manipulation Tasks
Bahaa, Aldeeb, Researcher in CS&E and MnRI, and Sahith Reddy, Chada, MS student in Robotics, GANOCS: Domain Adaptation of Normalized Object Coordinate Prediction Using Generative Adversarial Training
Carl, Winge, MS student in Robotics, User-Friendly Robot Learning
Travis, Beckerle, PhD student in ME, Brain-wide neural recordings in mice navigating physical spaces using a cranial-exoskeleton

Organizers

Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, Professor in CS&E and Director of Minnesota Robotics Institute

Rajesh Rajamani, Professor in Mechanical Engg, Associate Director (Research), Minnesota Robotics Institute

Karthik Desingh, Assistant Professor in CS&E, Minnesota Robotics Institute

Resha Tejpaul, Administrator of Minnesota Robotics Institute