Sean P. Walker

Computer Science Ph.D. candidate

Contact Information:

Clark Center Biorobotics Lab
Room E100
Stanford University
Stanford, CA  94305

Research Interests:

My general research interest is to apply learning to robotics, or more specifically, to apply learning to the interaction between the robot and the physical world. I am most interested in simple robot behavior problems such as walking, manipulation, grasping, and stimuli response. Instead of focusing on specific task implementations, my goals are generalized techniques that allow the robot to adapt to new situations.

My dissertation research relates to robot haptics, or the science of robot touch. My dissertation explores classification of objects using haptic properties and Naive Bayes classifiers in a two dimensional environment. It also provides a technique to guide haptic exploration with information gain and draws some conclusions about haptic information processing.

My PhD was be completed in April, 2009!

I am a former member of Ken Salisbury's research lab.

Courses:

Summer 2003 and Summer 2004: CS148: Introductory Computer Graphics

Dissertation:

Walker, S. P., Robot Haptics: Object Recognition Through Dynamic Exploration (draft), PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2009.

Video: WMV, 111MB, approx 17 minutes
(This was the background video during my defense. I'm hoping to post a shortened, possibly narrated, version soon.)

Publications:

Walker, S., and Salisbury, J. K., Difference-based Estimation of Support Friction, in IEEE/RSJ 2008 International Conference on Intelligent RObots and Systems, Nice, France, 2008.

Walker, S., and Salisbury, J. K., Pushing Using Learned Manipulation Maps, in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'08), Pasadena, California, 2008.

Walker, S., and Salisbury, J. K., The Probabilistic Robotics Studio: Interactive Robot Programming, in IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR'07), Jeju, South Korea, August 2007.

Walker, S., Loewke, K., Fischer, M., Liu, C., and Salisbury, J. K., An Optical Fiber Proximity Sensor for Haptic Exploration, in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'07), Roma, Italy, April 2007.

Walker, S., and Salisbury, J. K., Large Haptic Topographic Maps: MarsView and the Proxy Graph Algorithm, in ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 83-92, 2003.

Choset, H., Walker, S., Eiamsa-Ard, K., and Burdick, J., Sensor-Based Exploration: Incremental Construction of the Hierarchical Generalized Voronoi Graph. The International Journal of Robotics Research 19, no. 2 (2000): 126-148, 2000.

My Blog/Websites:

Please Excuse Me While I Clean My Lens (photography)
Used Camera Database (photographic lenses)