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

Machine Learning for Shipwreck Segmentation from Side Scan Sonar Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark
Advaith V. Sethuraman, Anja Sheppard, Onur Bagoren, Christopher Pinnow, Jamey Anderson, Timothy C. Havens, and Katherine A. Skinner
The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2024
Learning Surface Terrain Classifications from Ground Penetrating Radar
Anja Sheppard, Jason Brown, Nilton Renno, and Katherine A. Skinner
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2024
Automatic Data Processing for Space Robotics Machine Learning
Anja Sheppard and Katherine A. Skinner
Proceedings of the International Astronautical Congress, 2023

Service