Tekin Meriçli

Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute, Faculty Member

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I'm a Special Faculty / Commercialization Specialist at the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I used to work as a Senior Robotics Engineer. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU, leading the efforts on building intuitive and expressive interfaces to interact with semi-autonomous robotic systems that are intended to assist elderly and disabled. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robotics Institute at CMU, leading the Assistive Dexterous Arm (ADA) project at the Personal Robotics Lab, and working on the CHIMP robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge at NREC.

I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Engineering at Boğaziçi University, Turkey. My Ph.D. study contributed a case-based mobile manipulation framework.

I got my MSCS degree from the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, and my BS degree from the Department of Computer Engineering at Marmara University, Turkey. During the period July 2011 - January 2012, I was a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department at CMU, working under the supervision of Prof. Manuela Veloso as a member of the CORAL research group.

I've been an active member of the RoboCup society since 2004 and in particular I contributed to research and development pursued within Cerberus (team captain in 2009 and 2010) and UT Austin Villa RoboCup Standard Platform League robot soccer teams. I've also been a member of the technical and organizing committees of several RoboCup events since 2008. I was also one of the general co-chairs of the RoboCup 2011 Istanbul event. I also have experience in developing autonomous vehicles. I was a member of the UT - Austin Robot Technology DARPA Urban Challenge team, and Team Cappadocia, which got the 4th place in the MAGIC 2010 competition.

For more information on my work, please visit my website at http://tekin.mericli.com, and feel free to contact me consulting opportunities.
Supervisors: Levent Akin and Manuela Veloso
Address: Carnegie Mellon University
The Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890, USA

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Papers by Tekin Meriçli

Joint Attention by Gaze Interpolation and Saliency

by Tekin Meriçli, Roberto Valenti, and Çetin Meriçli

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 2013

Joint attention, which is the ability of coordination of a common point of reference with the com... more Joint attention, which is the ability of coordination of a common point of reference with the communicating party, emerges as a key factor in various interaction scenarios. This paper presents an image-based method for establishing joint attention between an experimenter and a robot. The precise analysis of the experimenter&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s eye region requires stability and high-resolution image acquisition, which is not always available. We investigate regression-based interpolation of the gaze direction from the head pose of the experimenter, which is easier to track. Gaussian process regression and neural networks are contrasted to interpolate the gaze direction. Then, we combine gaze interpolation with image-based saliency to improve the target point estimates and test three different saliency schemes. We demonstrate the proposed method on a human-robot interaction scenario. Cross-subject evaluations, as well as experiments under adverse conditions (such as dimmed or artificial illumination or motion blur), show that our method generalizes well and achieves rapid gaze estimation for establishing joint attention.

Austin Robot Technology DARPA Urban Challenge technical report

by Ryan Madigan and Tekin Meriçli

Cerberus' 05 Team Description Paper

by Buluc Celik, Hatice Kose, and Tekin Meriçli

The&amp;quot; Cerberus&amp;quot; team made its debut in RoboCup 2001 competition. This wa... more The&amp;quot; Cerberus&amp;quot; team made its debut in RoboCup 2001 competition. This was the first international team participating in the league as result of the joint research effort of a group of students and their professors from BoagaziГci University (BU), Istanbul, Turkey and Technical University Sofia, Plovdiv branch (TUSP), Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The team competed in Robocup 2002 and Robocup 2003. Currently BoagaziГci University is maintaining the team and it is the only team participating from East Europe.

Austin Robot Technology

by Ryan Madigan and Tekin Meriçli

Citeseer

Executive Summary Austin Robot Technology's (ART's) entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge ... more Executive Summary Austin Robot Technology's (ART's) entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge has two main goals. First and foremost, the team aims to create a fully autonomous vehicle that is capable of safely and robustly meeting all of the criteria laid out in the Technical Evaluation Criteria document [1]. Second, and almost as important, the team aims to produce, educate, and train members of the next generation of computer science and robotics researchers. This technical report documents our significant progress ...

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Darpa urban challenge technical report

by Ryan Madigan and Tekin Meriçli

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Symbiotic-Autonomous Service Robots for User-Requested Tasks in a Multi-Floor Building

by Susana Brandao and Tekin Meriçli

Although since the days of the Shakey robot, there have been a rich variety of mobile robots, we ... more Although since the days of the Shakey robot, there have been a rich variety of mobile robots, we realize that there were still no general autonomous, unsupervised mobile robots servicing users in our buildings. In this paper, we contribute the algorithms and results of our successful deployment of a service mobile robot agent, CoBot, in our multi-floor office environment. CoBot accepts requests from users, autonomously navigates between floors of the building, and asks for help when needed in a symbiotic relationship with the humans in its environment. We present the details of such challenging deployment, in particular the effective real-time depth-camera based localization and navigation algorithms, the symbiotic human-robot interaction approach, and the multitask dynamic planning and scheduling algorithm. We conclude with a comprehensive analysis of the extensive results of the last two weeks of daily CoBot runs for a total of more than 8.7 km, performing a large varied set of user requests. partment, Carnegie Mellon University, USA mmv, srosenth at cs.cmu.edu

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DARPA Urban Challenge Technical Report

by Ryan Madigan and Tekin Meriçli

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Austin Robot Technology

Austin Robot Technology's (ART's) entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge has two main goals. ... more Austin Robot Technology's (ART's) entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge has two main goals. First and foremost,the team aims to create a fully autonomous vehicle that is capable of safely and robustly meeting all of the criteria laid out in the Technical Evaluation Criteria document. Second, and almost as important, the team aims to produce, educate, and train members of the next generation of computer science and robotics researchers. This technical report documents our significant progress towards both of these goals as of May 2007 and presents a concrete plan to achieve them both fully by the time of the National Qualifying Event (NQE) in October. Specifically, it presents details of both our complete hardware system and our in-progress software, including design rationale, preliminary results,and future plans towards meeting the challenge. In addition, it provides details of the significant undergraduate research component of our efforts and emphasizes the educational value...

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A Case-Based Approach to Mobile Push-Manipulation

Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 2015

Improving Prehensile Mobile Manipulation Performance Through Experience Reuse

by Tekin Meriçli and Levent Akin

International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015

An Experience-Based Approach to Mobile Push-Manipulation

Push-manipulation of complex passive mobile objects using experimentally acquired motion models

by Levent Akin and Tekin Meriçli

Autonomous Robots, 2014

ABSTRACT In a realistic mobile push-manipulation scenario, it becomes non-trivial and infeasible ... more ABSTRACT In a realistic mobile push-manipulation scenario, it becomes non-trivial and infeasible to build analytical models that will capture the complexity of the interactions between the environment, each of the objects, and the robot as the variety of objects to be manipulated increases. We present an experience-based push-manipulation approach that enables the robot to acquire experimental models regarding how pushable real world objects with complex 3D structures move in response to various pushing actions. These experimentally acquired models can then be used either (1) for trying to track a collision-free guideline path generated for the object by reiterating pushing actions that result in the best locally-matching object trajectories until the goal is reached, or (2) as building blocks for constructing achievable push plans via a Rapidly-exploring Random Trees variant planning algorithm we contribute and executing them by reiterating the corresponding trajectories. We extensively experiment with these two methods in a 3D simulation environment and demonstrate the superiority of the achievable planning and execution concept through safe and successful push-manipulation of a variety of passively mobile pushable objects. Additionally, our preliminary tests in a real world scenario, where the robot is asked to arrange a set of chairs around a table through achievable push-manipulation, also show promising results despite the increased perception and action uncertainty, and verify the validity of our contributed method.

Introduction to autonomous mobile robotics using Lego Mindstorms NXT

by Tekin Meriçli and Levent Akin

Computer Science Education, 2013

ABSTRACT Teaching the fundamentals of robotics to computer science undergraduates requires design... more ABSTRACT Teaching the fundamentals of robotics to computer science undergraduates requires designing a well-balanced curriculum that is complemented with hands-on applications on a platform that allows rapid construction of complex robots, and implementation of sophisticated algorithms. This paper describes such an elective introductory course where the Lego Mindstorms NXT kits are used as the robot platform. The aims, scope and contents of the course are presented, and the design of the laboratory sessions as well as the term projects, which address several core problems of robotics and artificial intelligence simultaneously, are explained in detail.

Co-clustering for Missing Value Estimation on Netflix Dataset

Practical Extensions to Vision-Based Monte Carlo Localization Methods for Robot Soccer Domain

by Tekin Meriçli, Çetin Meriçli, and Buluc Celik

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

This paper proposes a set of practical extensions to the vision-based Monte Carlo localization fo... more This paper proposes a set of practical extensions to the vision-based Monte Carlo localization for RoboCup Sony AIBO legged robot soccer domain. The main disadvantage of AIBO robots is that they have a narrow field of view so the number of landmarks seen in one frame is usually not enough for geometric calculation. MCL methods have been shown to be accurate and robust in legged robot soccer domain but there are some practical issues that should be handled in order to maintain stability/elasticity ratio in a reasonable level. In other words, the fast convergence ability is required in case of kidnapping. But on the other hand, fast converge can be vulnerable when an occasional bad sensor reading is received. In this work, we presented four practical extensions in which two of them are novel approaches and the remaining ones are different from the previous implementations.

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Practical Extensions to Vision-Based Monte Carlo Localization Methods for Robot Soccer Domain

by Kemal Kaplan, Çetin Meriçli, Tekin Meriçli, Buluc Celik, and Levent Akin

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

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DARPA Urban Challenge Technical Report

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Cerberus'10 SPL Team

by Tekin Meriçli, Levent Akin, Ergi Ozkucur, and N. Ozkucur

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Derivation of gaze direction from head pose estimates

by Tekin Meriçli, Albert Ali Salah, and Çetin Meriçli

Automatic estimation of gaze direction information is important for certain applications of human... more Automatic estimation of gaze direction information is important for certain applications of human-robot and human-computer interaction. Depending on the properties of the specific application, it may be required to derive this information in real time from low resolution visual inputs, with as much precision as possible. In this paper we present an algorithm for transforming head pose estimates to gaze direction estimates. The main contribution of this study lies in the fact that it makes a clear distinction between head pose and gaze direction. Unlike some of the previous works in this field, we do not correct the head pose to correspond to a possible attention fixation point in accordance with the experiment scenario. Instead we propose using a concrete and environment-independent method for this purpose. To transform the head pose estimates into gaze direction, a Gaussian process regression model is proposed and the reasons validating this choice are discussed in detail.

Cerberus'08 Team Report

by Tekin Meriçli and Ergi Ozkucur

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