I am a researcher at the University of Washington pursuing a PhD in artificial intelligence and robotics with Dieter Fox and Ali Farhadi. My research is in online information gathering in interactive environments. See the Research tab for details.
Prior to the University of Washington, I completed a Masters in Robotics at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University under Siddhartha Srinivasa.
Before studying robotics and AI, I was a character technical director (rigger) at Blue Sky Studios and Omation Studios.
Contact:
aaronwalsman [at] gmail [dot] com
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Publications
Interactive and Embodied AI
Kotar, Klemen, Aaron Walsman, Roozbeh Mottaghi. “ENTL: Embodied Navigation Trajectory Learner.” International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2023.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02639
Walsman, Aaron, Muru Zhang, Sanjiban Choudhury, Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox. “Impossibly Good Experts and How to Follow Them.” International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023.
https://openreview.net/forum?id=sciA_xgYofB
Walsman, Aaron, Muru Zhang, Klemen Kotar, Karthik Desingh, Ali Farhadi, and Dieter Fox. "Break and make: Interactive structural understanding using lego bricks." European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2022.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13738
Walsman, Aaron, Yonatan Bisk, Saadia Gabriel, Dipendra Misra, Yoav Artzi, Yejin Choi, and Dieter Fox. "Early fusion for goal directed robotic vision." International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2019.
Nominated for IROS RoboCup Best Paper Award
https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.08824
3D vision
Agnew, William, Christopher Xie, Aaron Walsman, Octavian Murad, Yubo Wang, Pedro Domingos, and Siddhartha Srinivasa. "Amodal 3d reconstruction for robotic manipulation via stability and connectivity." Conference on Robot Learning, CoRL 2021.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13146
Wan, Weilin, Aaron Walsman, and Dieter Fox. "Part segmentation for highly accurate deformable tracking in occlusions via fully convolutional neural networks." International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.01504
Walsman, Aaron, Weilin Wan, Tanner Schmidt, and Dieter Fox. "Dynamic high resolution deformable articulated tracking." International Conference on 3D Vision, 3DV 2017.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07999
Robotics
Calli, Berk, Aaron Walsman, Arjun Singh, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Pieter Abbeel, Aaron M. Dollar. “Benchmarking in Manipulation Research: The YCB Object and Model Set and Benchmarking Protocols.” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine Special Issue on Replicable and Measurable Robotics Research 2015.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03143
Zeglin, Garth, Aaron Walsman, Laura Herlant, Zhaodong Zheng, Yuyang Guo, Michael C. Koval, Kevin Lenzo, Hui Jun Tay, Prasanna Velagapudi, Katie Correll, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa. “HERB's Sure Thing: a rapid drama system for rehearsing and performing live robot theater.” Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts, ARSO 2014.
https://ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/2014/9/ARSO2014-Drama.pdf
Graphics and Animation
Walsman, Aaron, Todd Hill. “Building the Birds of Rio.” Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 2011.
Films
Rio II: Bird Lead for the Character Rigging Department. Updated bird control systems to the character pipeline developed for Epic. Lead the development of all bird control rigs on Rio II. Rebuilt the animation control rig for Nigel the Cockatoo.
Epic: Creature Lead for the Character Rigging Department. Developed new character pipeline tools to simplify and upgrade the character rigging process at Blue Sky. Lead the development of all creature control rigs in Epic. Developed several new animation control systems for snails including articulated eye stalks, realtime soft contact deformation and prehensile fins. Built the control rig for Grub the Snail.
Ice Age IV: Continental Drift: Senior Character Technical Director. Provided rigging tools and support while developing new character pipeline tools for Epic.
Rio: Bird Lead for the Character Rigging Department. Developed new animation control systems for bird wings, feathers, necks and spines. Lead the development of all bird control rigs in Rio. Built the control rig for Nigel the Cockatoo.
Ice Age III: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Character Technical Director. Developed new animation control systems for pterodactyl wings and built the pterodactyl control rigs.
Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who: Character Technical Director. Developed animation control systems for Horton the Elephant’s ears and trunk. Built the control rig for Dr. Larue.
The Barnyard: Character Technical Director and Generalist. Built a character pipeline that supported the development of over 100 character control rigs. Built the control rigs for several main characters.