Robin Swanson

Bio

I'm a PhD candidate with Kyros Kutulakos at The University of Toronto and The Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. My research interests include computational photography, astronomical imaging, adaptive optics, and machine learning.

Previously: affiliate fellow at The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence; MSc with Wolfgang Heidrich at KAUST and BSc in Physics and Computer Science at The University of Manitoba.

I have also interned at Facebook Reality Labs (Formerly Oculus Research), TRIUMF (Vancouver, BC), and Taiyo Co., Ltd. (Wakayama, Japan).

Publications

Robust supervised learning for closed loop adaptive optics predictive control Robin Swanson, Jacob Taylor, Masen Lamb, Suresh Sivanandam SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation (Oral Presentation). 2024
ESCAPE: Efficient Synthesis of Calibrations for Adaptive optics through Pseudo-synthetic and Empirical methods Jacob Taylor, Robin Swanson, Parker Levesque, Masen Lamb, Amali Vaz, Manny Montoya, Andrew Gardner, Katie M. Morzinski, Suresh Sivanandam SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation (Oral Presentation). 2024
pyRTC: An open-source Python solution for kHz real-time control of adaptive optics systems Jacob Taylor, Robin Swanson, Suresh Sivanandam Under Review: Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). 2024
Adaptive hardware mediated sup-pixel super resolution Robin Swanson, Suresh Sivanandam, Kiriakos Kutulakos SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation. 2022
Closed loop predictive control of adaptive optics systems with convolutional neural networks Robin Swanson, Masen Lamb, Carlos Correia, Suresh Sivanandam, Kiriakos Kutulakos Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). 2021
Simultaneous estimation of segmented telescope phasing errors and non-common path aberrations from adaptiveoptics corrected images Masen Lamb, Carlos Correia, Suresh Sivanandam, Robin Swanson, Polina Zavyalova Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). 2021
Wavefront reconstruction and prediction with convolutional neural networks Robin Swanson, Masen Lamb, Carlos Correia, Suresh Sivanandam, Kiriakos Kutulakos SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation (Oral Presentation). 2018
Consensus Convolutional Sparse Coding Biswarup Choudhury*, Robin Swanson*, Felix Heide*, Gordon Wetzstein, Wolfgang Heidrich International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). 2017
Sparse Representations of Hyperspectral Images Robin Swanson, Wolfgang Heidrich Masters Thesis. 2016
Material Classification Using Raw Time-of-Flight Measurements Shuochen Su, Felix Heide, Robin Swanson, Jonathan Klein, Clara Callenberg, Matthias Hullin, Wolfgang Heidrich IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 2016

MAPS: the MMT Adaptive optics exoPlanet characterization System

I have been involved with the MAPS project to upgrade the MMT's legacy AO system since 2022. Here at the University of Toronto we have been tasked with designing, testing, and installing the infrared pyramid wavefront sensor as well as creating an adaptive optics (AO) calibration pipeline. Unlike most AO systems, MAPS has a convex adaptive secondary mirror making for a... fun and unique calibration process.

Commissioning MAPS, the MMT AO exoPlanet characterization System Katie M. Morzinski, Amali Vaz, Manny M. Montoya, Cameron C. Ard, Kimberly Chapman, Phil Daly, Olivier Durney, Andrew Gardner, Olivier Guyon, Ruby Huie, Buell T. Jannuzi, Ron Jones, Krishna Kanumalla, Craig A. Kulesa, Jarron M. Leisenring, Joseph D. Long, Eden A. McEwen, Jared R. Males, Bianca Payan, Lauren Perez, Jorge Sanchez, Suresh Sivanandam, Robin Swanson, Jacob Taylor, Orlando Trevino, Dan D. Vargas, Grant S. West, Jennifer L. Patience, Jess A. Johnson SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications (Oral Presentation). 2024
Tuning the MAPS adaptive secondary mirror: PID tuning, actuator power spectra and failure diagnosis Jess A. Johnson, Amali Vaz, Manny M. Montoya, Cameron C. Ard, Kimberly Chapman, Phil Daly, Olivier Durney, Andrew Gardner, Olivier Guyon, Ruby Huie, Buell T. Jannuzi, Ron Jones, Krishna Kanumalla, Craig A. Kulesa, Jarron M. Leisenring, Joseph D. Long, Eden A. McEwen, Jared R. Males, Bianca Payan, Lauren Perez, Jorge Sanchez, Suresh Sivanandam, Robin Swanson, Jacob Taylor, Orlando Trevino, Dan D. Vargas, Grant S. West, Jennifer L. Patience, Katie M. Morzinski SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation. 2024
Commissioning Status of the MAPS Adaptive Optics System on the MMT Jacob Taylor, Narsireddy Anugu, Jared Carlson, Kimberly Chapman, Shaojie Chen, Olivier Durney, Chuck Fellows, Andrew Gardner, Olivier Guyon, Tim Hardy, Lori Harrison, Phil Hinz, Buell Jannuzi, Jess Johnson, Craig Kulesa, Masen Lamb, Jared Males, Suresh Sivanandam, Jennifer Patience, Robin Swanson, Parker Levesque, Emily Mailhot, Don Mccarthy, Manny Montoya, Katie Morzinski, Dan Vargas, Grant West, and Amali Vaz Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 7th Edition. 2023
On-Sky Adaptive Secondary Interaction Matrix Calibration on the MMT Robin Swanson, Jacob Taylor, Manny Montoya, Suresh Sivanandam, Amali Vaz, Dan Vargas, Grant West, Andrew Gardner, Jess Johnson, Olivier Durney, Jenny Patience, Masen Lamb, Parker Levesque Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes 7th Edition. 2023
A near-infrared pyramid wavefront sesnsor for the MMT (Multi Meter Telescope) Jacob Taylor, Suresh Sivanandam, Narsireddy Anugu, Adam Butko, Shaojie Chen, Olivier Durney, Tim Hardy, Masen Lamb, Manny Montoya, Katie Morzinski, and Robin Swanson SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation. 2022