MASC Research Areas
Recent HighlightsMetal blossomWe proposed new computational origami methods that allow a laser to fold 3D metal structures by imitating flower blooming. More videos can be found here (Winter 2020/Spring 2021)Designing Human-Robot Coexistence Space When the human-robot interactions become ubiquitous, the environment surrounding these interactions will have a significant impact on the safety and comfort of the human and the effectiveness and efficiency of the robot. This work uses an autonomous wheelchair as an example and investigates the computational design in the human-robot coexistence spaces. (See also a related project in VR wheel training) (Fall 2020) Planning Laser Forming Motion using Thermal Simulation in the Loop This work investigates the idea of efficiently incorporating computationally expensive physics simulation within the folding motion planner to provide a better estimation of the foldability. Laser forming origami is used as an example to demonstrate the benefits of considering the properties beyond geometry. (Fall 2020, to appear in ICRA 2021) Learning a Robust Group Controller using Deep Reinforcement Learning How can a robot herd a coherent group among obstacles if the robot has no prior knowledge about the behaviors of the group? We trained a robust controller using deep reinforcement learning that is robust to control various types of the group (sheep, cattle, or geese). (Fall 2020, to appear in RAL+ICRA 2021) Persistent Covering under Energy and Latency Constraints Many practical UAV tasks cannot be accomplished by off-the-shelf quadcopters that has only 20 minute endurance followed by a 40-min charging time. In this work, we ask what is the minimum number of quadcopters needed to provide a persistent covering under energy (flying and recharging times) and latency constraints (revisit time). video (Fall 2020, to appear in RAL+ICRA 2021) Laser Form Metal Origami An end-to-end solution for forming complex 3D metal surfaces using low cost laser. A Stanford bunny of 69 faces formed by 0.007" stainless steel is shown here. (Summer 2020) Computational Kirigami Wrapping We presented a work on computational kirigami wrapping, a universal method to wrap 3D-curved surfaces beyond materiality. (published in Science Advances 2020)Visibility Integrity Visibility Integrity measures if points from a region can see similar objects. Visibility Integrity is used to plan motion of the camera following a moving flock in 3D. (IEEE RA-L / IROS, 2019 Fall) Compacting Voxelized Polyhedra via Tree Stacking We developed a heuristic based pipeline that finds the optimal tree-structured stacking that provides both significant volume compaction and better stability. (Computer Graphics Forum / Pacific Graphics, 2019 Fall) Computational Laser Origami of Convex Surfaces We develop the first known computational method to fabricate convex 3D metal surfaces using laser forming. (ACM SCF, 2019 Spring) Super Compaction and Transformation We found a universal method to compact 3D shapes via stacking while allowing transformation between different shapes. (2018 Spring) Creating Easily Foldable Polyhedral Nets
We proposed a learning strategy that creates easily foldable or even linearly foldable polyhedral nets. Planing a continuous folding motion for these optimized nets requires orders of magnitude less computation. (RSS and ACM SCF, 2018 Spring)3D Paper Model PatternsWe maintain a repository to archive the unfoldings (nets) of polyhedra created by our software tools. Models will continue to be added.Material Transfer Guilin Liu and researchers at Adobe created a Physically Based Rendering Network that can synthesize realistic re-rendering of a single object with different surface materials. (ICCV, 2017 Fall) Layer Decomposition We proposed a way to decompose a single image into layers of monochrome image via RGB-space geometry. (TOG, 2017 Summer)  Disjoint Convex ShellWe developed a software tool that turns a shape into a set of disjoint convex objects and made paper crafting much easier. See the project page: DC shell for detail. (SPM, 2017 Spring) Making Shadow ArtOur work on shadow art is featured on the cover page of magazine Hyperseeing. (2016 Summer) Local Minkowski SumWe construct local Minkowski sum to enable continuous penetration depth on complex shapes. (2016 Spring)Learning to Segment and Unfold We proposed to simultaneously segment and unfold a non-convex mesh into foldable patterns by learning from failed unfoldings. This makes paper crafting easier. (2016 Spring) Continuous Visibility FeatureA new type of visibility measurement named Continuous Visibility Feature (CVF) is proposed. CVF better encodes the surface and part information of mesh than the tradition line-of-sight based visibility. CVF can be used for many shape analysis tasks. (2015 Spring) Convex Ridge SeparationWe investigate an approach that decomposes a mesh based on the identification of Convex Ridges. Intuitively, convex ridges are the protruding parts of the mesh. (2014 Fall)Dual-Space Decomposition
We proposed a new decomposition method, called Dual-space Decomposition that handles complex 2D shapes by recognizing the importance of the negative areas (e.g. holes). This work is to be published in CVPR 2014. (2014 Spring) Folding rigid origamiWe developed an adaptive randomized search to fold rigid origami. Ph.D. student Zhonghua Xi created several web-based tools for creating crease patterns and planning folding motions. (2014 Spring) Predict CollisionsWe found a way to compute the earliest collision time for a mobile robot (modeled as a point or polygon) moving among obstacles (polygon or articulated object) whose motion is unknown. (2013 Winter)More in archived research hightlighs | All Projects
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Research projects at MASC group are supported in part by NSF, DOT (FHWA), USGS, AFOSR, CIT and George Mason University
List of MASC Research Pages