- Date & Time: Tuesday, March 28, 2017; 1:30 - 5:30PM
Location: Google (355 Main St., 5th Floor, Cambridge MA)
MERL Contacts: Daniel N. Nikovski; Anthony Vetro; Jinyun Zhang Brief - How will AI and robotics reshape the economy and create new opportunities (and challenges) across industries? Who are the hottest companies that will compete with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Uber to create the future? And what are New England innovators doing to strengthen the local cluster and help lead the national discussion?
MERL will be participating in Xconomy's third annual conference on AI and robotics in Boston to address these questions. MERL President & CEO, Dick Waters, will be on a panel discussing the status and future of self-driving vehicles. Lab members will also be on hand demonstrate and discuss recent advances AI and robotics technology.
The agenda and registration for the event can be found online: https://xconomyforum85.eventbrite.com.
-
- Date: July 13, 2015 - July 17, 2015
Research Area: Machine Learning
Brief - SA group members (M. Liu, S. Lin (intern), S. Ramalingam, O. Tuzel) presented a paper at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Rome July 13-17 called 'Layered Interpretation of Street View Images'. The results they reported are now listed as the leader of the benchmark competition sponsored by Daimler. [Note that at that URL ref 2 is from collaboration with Daimler and it uses a FPGA for high speed, whereas MERL result is obtained with desktop computer and GPU.].
-
- Date: July 11, 2014
Where: R&D Magazine
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - A team with members from MERL, ATC, and Meiden received an R&D 100 award for its work on Mitsubishi Electric's MELFA-3D Vision system for industrial robot arms. This system completely automates bin picking a task for picking up parts that are randomly placed in a bin and aligning their poses for assembly processes.
-
- Date & Time: Thursday, November 15, 2012; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Dr. Eduardo Torres-Jara, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Research Area: Computer Vision
Abstract - This talk presents an alternative approach to robotic manipulation. In this approach, manipulation is mainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. The motivation behind this approach stems from the fact that manipulating an object necessarily implies coming into contact with it. As a result, directly sensing physical contact seems more important than vision to control the interaction of the object and the robot. In this work, the traditional approach of a highly precise arm guided by a vision system is replaced by one that uses a low mechanical impedance arm with dense tactile sensing and exploration capabilities.
The robots OBRERO and GoBot have been built to implement this approach. We have developed a novel tactile sensing technology and mounted our sensors on the robots' hands. These sensors are biologically inspired and present adequate features for manipulation. The success of this approach is shown by picking up objects in a poorly modeled environment. This task, simple for humans, has been a challenge for robots. The robot can deal with new, unmodeled objects. Specifically, OBRERO can gently contact, explore, lift, and place an object in a different location. It can also detect basic slippage and external forces acting on an object while it is held. These tasks can be performed successfully with very light objects, without fixtures, and on slippery surfaces. Similarly, GoBot is capable of manipulating small objects such as the stones in the game GO. Both OBRERO and GoBot perform all of their manipulations using tactile feedback.
-
- Date: August 1, 2008
Where: ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The articles "Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting" by Rubinstein, M., Shamir, A. and Avidan, A. and "Glare Aware Photography: 4D Ray Sampling for Reducing Glare Effects of Camera Lenses" by Raskar, R., Agrawal, A., Wilson, C. and Veeraraghavan, A. were published in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).
-
- Date: June 28, 2008
Where: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
MERL Contacts: Matthew Brand; Anthony Vetro Brief - The papers "Non-Refractive Modulators for Encoding and Capturing Scene Appearance and Depth" by Veeraraghavan, A., Agrawal, A., Raskar, R., Mohan, A. and Tumblin, J., "Feature Transformation of Biometric Templates for Secure Biometric Systems based on Error Correcting Codes" by Sutcu, Y., Rane, S., Yedidia, J.S., Draper, S.C. and Vetro, A., "Constant Time O(1) Bilateral Filtering" by Porikli, F., "Learning on Lie Groups for Invariant Detection and Tracking" by Tuzel, O., Porikli, F. and Meer, P., "Kernel Integral Images: A Framework for Fast non-Uniform Filtering" by Hussein, M., Porikli, F. and Davis, L., "A Conditional Random Field for Automatic Photo Editing" by Brand, M. and Pletscher, P., "Boosting Adaptive Linear Weak Classifiers for Online Learning and Tracking" by Parag, T., Porikli, F. and Elgammai, A. and "Sensing Increased Image Resolution Using Aperture Masks" by Mohan, A., Huang, X., Tumblin, J. and Raskar, R. were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
-
- Date: July 15, 2007
Where: ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) Brief - The articles "Prakash: Lighting Aware Motion Capture using Photosensing Markers and Multiplexed Illuminators" by Raskar, R., Nii, H., deDecker, B., Hashimoto, Y., Summet, J., Moore, D., Zhao, Y., Westhues, J., Dietz, P., Barnwell, J., Nayar, S., Inami, M., Bekaert, P., Noland, M., Branzoi, V. and Bruns, E., "Dappled Photography: Mask Enhanced Cameras for Heterodyned Light Fields and Coded Aperture Refocusing" by Veeraraghavan, A., Raskar, R., Agrawal, A., Mohan, A. and Tumblin, J., "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing" by Avidan, S. and Shamir, A., "Factored Time-Lapse Video" by Sunkavalli, K., Matusik, W., Pfister, H. and Rusinkiewicz, S., "Post-production Facial Performance Relighting using Reflectance Transfer" by Peers, P., Tamura, N., Matusik, W. and Debevec, P. and "Multi-scale Capture of Facial Geometry and Motion" by Bickel, B., Botsch, M., Angst, R., Matusik, W., Otaduy, M., Pfister, H. and Gross, M. were published in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG).
-
- Date: October 17, 2005
Where: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Research Area: Computer Vision
Brief - The papers "Shadow Flow: A Recursive Method to Learn Moving Cast Shadows" by Porikli, F. and Thornton, J., "An Algebraic Approach to Surface Reconstruction from Gradient Fields" by Agrawal, A., Chellappa, R. and Raskar, R. and "Discontinuity Preserving Stereo with Small Baseline Multi-Flash Illumination" by Feris, R., Raskar, R., Chen, L., Tan, K.-H. and Turk, M. were presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).
-