•   When: Friday, October 30, 2015 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
•   Speakers: Henrik Christensen
•   Location: Research Hall, Room 163
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Abstract

As robotic systems are moving from well controlled settings to unstructured environments, they are required to operate in dynamic and cluttered scenes. Finding an object, estimating its pose, and tracking the pose over time in these scenes are challenging problems. Although various approaches have tackled these problems, their scope of objects and robustness of their solutions are still limited. We focus on object perception using visual sensory information, which spans from the monocular camera to the recently appeared RGB-D sensor, and address four important challenges related to the topic of 6-DOF object pose estimation and tracking in unstructured environments.

A large number of 3D object models are widely available in online object model databases, and these object models have significant prior information which includes geometric shapes and photometric appearance. We note that using both geometric and photometric attributes available from the models enables to handle both textured and textureless objects. We present efforts to broaden the spectrum of objects by combining geometric and photometric features.

Another challenge is how to dependably estimate and track the pose of an object in spite of clutter in the background. The difficulties of object perception mainly depend on the degree of clutter. The background clutter is likely to lead to false measurements, and the wrong measurements tend to result in inaccurate pose estimates. We present two multiple pose hypotheses frameworks: a particle filtering framework for tracking and a voting framework for pose estimation.

Speaker's Bio

Henrik I. Christensen is the KUKA Chair of Robotics and a Distinguished Professor of Computing. He is also the director of the Robotics & Intelligent Machines Center at Georgia Tech.
Christensen received his first degree in mechanical engineering and subsequently received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Aalborg University in Denmark. His research focuses on human centered robotics, specifically perception, human-robot interaction, and systems modeling. A large number of companies have commercialized his research and he has maintained active collaborations with researchers and companies across three continents. Christensen also serves as an advisor to numerous companies and agencies across the world.

The author of more than 300 contributions in the areas of computer vision, artificial intelligence, and computer vision, Christensen held positions at Aalborg University, Royal Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Georgia Tech faculty.

Additionally, Christensen was the founder of the European Network of Excellence in Robotics (1999-2006), and in 2011, he founded the U.S. Robotics Virtual Organization. He was the coordinator of the effort to formulate a National Robotics roadmap, which was presented to congress in 2009 and 2013.

Christensen serves on seven editorial boards across the areas of computer vision and robotics. He is the editor in chief of Robotics and Trends in Robotics and serves as the senior technology lead for the Robotics Technology Consortium (RTC). He is also a member on the boards of the Robot Industry Association (RIA) and the College Industry Council for Material Handling Industry Education (CICHME).