Anja Sheppard

I’m a PhD student in Robotics at the University of Michigan where I focus on autonomy and perception for space.

About Me

Anja Sheppard is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan, where she works under Dr. Katherine Skinner in the Field Robotics Group. Her research focus is primarly in perception for robots in extreme environments. She is particularly interested about the use of robotics for science, such as rovers searching for water on the Moon or underwater vehicles surveying for undiscovered shipwrecks. Anja is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Draper Scholar. She previously collaborated with NASA’s Johnson Space Center on dense 3D reconstruction for humanoid robots and with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars 2020 Science Operations team. She earned her B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2022.

News

September 2024 Anja presents at the AUV 2024 Symposium in Boston, MA on the AI4Shipwrecks dataset.
June 2024 Anja represents the Field Robotics Group at CVPR, where she presents her paper “Learning Surface Terrain Classifications from Ground Penetrating Radar” at the Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum workshop.
May 2024 Anja is awarded a fellowship with the Draper Scholars program.
February 2024 The Field Robotics Group is interviewed by the University of Michigan Library blog.
January 2024 Anja conducts field work in Utah at the Mars Desert Research Station in collaboration with Duquesne University, Boston University, and MIT.
December 2023 Anja advances to candidacy!
June 2023 The Field Robotics Group conducts fieldwork on Lake Huron to test a shipwreck detection network.

Publications

ai4shipwrecks_flowchart

Sethuraman, Advaith V., et al. “Machine learning for shipwreck segmentation from side scan sonar imagery: Dataset and benchmark.” The International Journal of Robotics Research (2024): 02783649241266853.

gpr_flowchart

Sheppard, Anja, et al. “Learning Surface Terrain Classifications from Ground Penetrating Radar.” Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2024.

colocation_flowchart

Sheppard, Anja, and Katherine A. Skinner. “Automatic Data Processing for Space Robotics Machine Learning.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.01932 (2023).

Service