The transformation from high level task specification to low level motion control is a fundamental issue in sensorimotor control in animals and robots. This thesis develops a control scheme called virtual model control ...

In recent years, researchers in artificial intelligence have become interested in replicating human physical reasoning talents in computers. One of the most important skills in this area is predicting how physical ...

All intelligence relies on search --- for example, the search for an intelligent agent's next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right ...

In a distributed model of intelligence, peer components need to communicate with one another. I present a system which enables two agents connected by a thick twisted bundle of wires to bootstrap a simple communication ...

The registration of pre-operative volumetric datasets to intra- operative two-dimensional images provides an improved way of verifying patient position and medical instrument loca- tion. In applications from orthopedics ...

Freehand sketching is both a natural and crucial part of design, yet is unsupported by current design automation software. We are working to combine the flexibility and ease of use of paper and pencil with the processing ...

In this thesis I present a language for instructing a sheet of identically-programmed, flexible, autonomous agents (``cells'') to assemble themselves into a predetermined global shape, using local interactions. The ...

This thesis presents the development of hardware, theory, and experimental methods to enable a robotic manipulator arm to interact with soils and estimate soil properties from interaction forces. Unlike the majority of ...

There are numerous text documents available in electronic form. More and more are becoming available every day. Such documents represent a massive amount of information that is easily accessible. Seeking value in this huge ...

This thesis presents a statistical framework for object recognition. The framework is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager nearly 30 years ago. The basic idea is to model an ...

In early stages of architectural design, as in other design domains, the language used is often very abstract. In architectural design, for example, architects and their clients use experiential terms such as "private" ...

I have added support for predicate dispatching, a powerful generalization of other dispatching mechanisms, to the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). To demonstrate its utility, I used predicate dispatching to enhance Weyl, ...

The goal of this research is to develop the prototype of a tactile sensing platform for anthropomorphic manipulation research. We investigate this problem through the fabrication and simple control of a planar 2-DOF robotic ...

This thesis attempts to quantify the amount of information needed to learn certain tasks. The tasks chosen vary from learning functions in a Sobolev space using radial basis function networks to learning grammars in ...

The work described in this thesis began as an inquiry into the nature and use of optimization programs based on "genetic algorithms." That inquiry led, eventually, to three powerful heuristics that are broadly applicable ...

Segmentation of medical imagery is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the images, as well as to the absence of models of the anatomy that fully capture the possible deformations in each structure. Brain ...

This thesis presents a new actuator system consisting of a micro-actuator and a macro-actuator coupled in parallel via a compliant transmission. The system is called the Parallel Coupled Micro-Macro Actuator, or PaCMMA. ...

A new information-theoretic approach is presented for finding the pose of an object in an image. The technique does not require information about the surface properties of the object, besides its shape, and is robust ...

Babies are born with simple manipulation capabilities such as reflexes to perceived stimuli. Initial discoveries by babies are accidental until they become coordinated and curious enough to actively investigate their ...

Scheduling tasks to efficiently use the available processor resources is crucial to minimizing the runtime of applications on shared-memory parallel processors. One factor that contributes to poor processor utilization ...