Seminar: Teja Digumarti and Yi Sun, Oct 30th 2019
When: Weds, Oct 30th 2019, 4:00p
Where: Rose St Building Seminar Area
Speaker: Teja Digumarti
Title: Semantic Segmentation and Mapping in Natural Environments
Abstract: Research on 3D Reconstruction, Semantic Segmentation has made great progress over the past decade. However, a vast majority of this research is targeted towards human made environments like indoors and urban outdoors. These techniques do not translate directly into the natural world because characteristics of natural structures such as self-similar and repeating elements, occlusions, complex geometry and semi-rigid structures pose challenges to existing techniques. This talk will present a few ways to tackle these challenges, specifically for semantic segmentation and mapping, with the end goal being accurate reconstruction of natural structures like trees and corals. The talk will explore the use of deep learning and learning from simulation as useful tools in addressing these challenges.
Bio: Tejaswi Digumarti is a research associate at the Sydney Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems. His research interest is in taking robots into the natural world, with a focus on scene understanding, mapping and 3D reconstruction techniques. Having successfully defended his thesis, he is yet to obtain his Ph.D. degree from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His Ph.D. work was in collaboration with Disney Research. Prior to that he obtained his Masters’ degree in Robotics, Systems and Control from ETH Zurich, Switzerland and his Bachelors’ degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Jodhpur, India.
Speaker: Yi Sun
Title: Soft robotic pad for manta ray inspired robotic swimmer
Abstract: The development of silicone-based soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) has a history of more than two decades. However, the vast majority of the existing SPAs fall into one single appearance which is the finger-like one-dimensional (1D) body. Therefore, making a 2D SPA by adding a dimension to the 1D SPA can be the breakthrough in the format of the SPAs. Moreover the motion types can be expanded for SPAs due to the additional dimension. This presentation will talk about the development of 2D SPA called soft robotic pad (SRP) which is shaped into a flat 2D body and can be mechanically programmed to do a variety of surface morphing with a constant thickness. A novel and well-designed fabrication technique will be presented, followed by its application in a manta ray inspired robotic swimmer.
Bio: Yi Sun is a research fellow at the Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. His research interest and focus are soft robotics, especially the soft material based soft pneumatic/hydraulic actuators and robots. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in National University of Singapore (NUS) under NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering. Before that, he also had a one-year research experience in the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at EPFL, where he started his research on soft robots.