Robotics
Where hardware, software and machine intelligence come together.
Our research is interdisciplinary and focuses on sensing, planning, reasoning, and control of single and multi-agent systems, including both manipulation and mobile robots. We strive to develop algorithms and methods for factory automation, smart building and transportation applications using machine learning, computer vision, RF/optical sensing, wireless communications, control theory and signal processing. Key research themes include bin picking and object manipulation, sensing and mapping of indoor areas, coordinated control of robot swarms, as well as robot learning and simulation.
Quick Links
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Researchers
Daniel N.
Nikovski
Stefano
Di Cairano
Siddarth
Jain
Arvind
Raghunathan
Radu
Corcodel
Yebin
Wang
William S.
Yerazunis
Chiori
Hori
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Abraham P.
Vinod
Avishai
Weiss
Tim K.
Marks
Alexander
Schperberg
Anoop
Cherian
Jonathan
Le Roux
Scott A.
Bortoff
Ye
Wang
Bingnan
Wang
Matthew
Brand
Purnanand
Elango
Pedro
Miraldo
Philip V.
Orlik
Abraham
Goldsmith
Jianlin
Guo
Jordan
Leung
Jing
Liu
Hassan
Mansour
Yoshiki
Masuyama
Saviz
Mowlavi
Zhaolin
Ren
Kento
Tomita
Anthony
Vetro
Kei
Suzuki
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Awards
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AWARD Honorable Mention Award at NeurIPS 23 Instruction Workshop Date: December 15, 2023
Awarded to: Lingfeng Sun, Devesh K. Jha, Chiori Hori, Siddharth Jain, Radu Corcodel, Xinghao Zhu, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Diego Romeres
MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- MERL Researchers received an "Honorable Mention award" at the Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at the NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans. The workshop was on the topic of instruction tuning and Instruction following for Large Language Models (LLMs). MERL researchers presented their work on interactive planning using LLMs for partially observable robotic tasks during the oral presentation session at the workshop.
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AWARD MERL Researchers Win Best Workshop Poster Award at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Date: June 2, 2023
Awarded to: Yuki Shirai, Devesh Jha, Arvind Raghunathan and Dennis Hong
MERL Contact: Arvind Raghunathan
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL's paper titled: "Closed-Loop Tactile Controller for Tool Manipulation" Won the Best Poster Award in the workshop on "Embracing contacts : Making robots physically interact with our world". First author and MERL intern, Yuki Shirai, was presented with the award at a ceremony held at ICRA in London. MERL researchers Devesh Jha, Principal Research Scientist, and Arvind Raghunathan, Senior Principal Research Scientist and Senior Team Leader as well as Prof. Dennis Hong of University of California, Los Angeles are also coauthors.
The paper presents a technique to manipulate an object using a tool in a closed-loop fashion using vision-based tactile sensors. More information about the workshop and the various speakers can be found here https://sites.google.com/view/icra2023embracingcontacts/home.
- MERL's paper titled: "Closed-Loop Tactile Controller for Tool Manipulation" Won the Best Poster Award in the workshop on "Embracing contacts : Making robots physically interact with our world". First author and MERL intern, Yuki Shirai, was presented with the award at a ceremony held at ICRA in London. MERL researchers Devesh Jha, Principal Research Scientist, and Arvind Raghunathan, Senior Principal Research Scientist and Senior Team Leader as well as Prof. Dennis Hong of University of California, Los Angeles are also coauthors.
See All Awards for MERL -
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News & Events
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NEWS MERL Presents Set-Based Reachability Research for Spacecraft Guidance at NASA Johnson Space Center Date: April 15, 2026 - April 16, 2026
Where: NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston
MERL Contacts: Abraham P. Vinod; Avishai Weiss
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers Avishai Weiss and Abraham Vinod visited NASA Johnson Space Center to present recent advances in set-based reachability analysis for spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control, with an emphasis on powered descent guidance for lunar landing. They delivered an invited talk titled “Safe and Optimal Control for Spacecraft GN&C using Set-Based Reachability Analysis.”
The presentation introduced MERL’s recently developed set-based computational techniques for safe, optimal, and robust spacecraft control, including methods that specialize the approach for computing maximum divert envelopes and enabling real-time landing footprint prediction for landers. The talk was attended by researchers from NASA and the University of Washington, and generated extensive technical discussion.
- MERL researchers Avishai Weiss and Abraham Vinod visited NASA Johnson Space Center to present recent advances in set-based reachability analysis for spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control, with an emphasis on powered descent guidance for lunar landing. They delivered an invited talk titled “Safe and Optimal Control for Spacecraft GN&C using Set-Based Reachability Analysis.”
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NEWS MERL researcher Abraham Vinod delivers an invited talk at CVXPY workshop 2026 Date: February 20, 2026
MERL Contact: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researcher Abraham Vinod was an invited speaker at the inaugural CVXPY Workshop 2026, held at Stanford University, USA. CVXPY is an open-source, Python-embedded modeling language for convex optimization, and the workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to share ideas and real-world Python-based applications of convex optimization. Abraham’s talk, titled “pycvxset: Convex Sets in Python,” introduced MERL’s recently released open-source toolbox for convex set manipulation to the CVXPY community. The talk highlighted the toolbox’s capabilities and showcased recent applications in autonomous precision landing and robotics. The workshop details are available at https://www.cvxpy.org/workshop/2026/.
See All News & Events for Robotics -
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Research Highlights
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Internships
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OR0298: Internship - Robotic Disassembly
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OR0299: Internship - Human-Robot Interaction
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EA0235: Internship - Planning and Control of Mobile Manipulators
See All Internships for Robotics -
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Openings
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OR0294: Research Scientist - Robotics Team Leader
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OR0293: Research Scientist - Robotics
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CI0177: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Agentic AI
See All Openings at MERL -
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Recent Publications
- , "GPU-Accelerated Continuous-Time Successive Convexification for Contact-Implicit Legged Locomotion", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-068 PDF
- @inproceedings{Buckner2026jun,
- author = {Buckner, Samuel and Elango, Purnanand},
- title = {{GPU-Accelerated Continuous-Time Successive Convexification for Contact-Implicit Legged Locomotion}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-068}
- }
- , "SplatCtrl: Perception–Action Coupling via Gaussian Scene Representations and Reactive Robot Control", 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-069 PDF
- @inproceedings{Jain2026jun,
- author = {{Jain, Siddarth and Choi, Ho Jin}},
- title = {{SplatCtrl: Perception–Action Coupling via Gaussian Scene Representations and Reactive Robot Control}},
- booktitle = {2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics \& Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-069}
- }
- , "M-VTOP: Modular Visuo-Tactile Object Pose Estimation for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation", 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-070 PDF
- @inproceedings{Oller2026jun,
- author = {Oller, Miquel and Qian, Qiyang and Corcodel, Radu and Jain, Siddarth},
- title = {{M-VTOP: Modular Visuo-Tactile Object Pose Estimation for High-Precision Robotic Manipulation}},
- booktitle = {2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics \& Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-070}
- }
- , "Safe Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Combined Model and Learning-based Control", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-072 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Schperberg2026jun,
- author = {Schperberg, Alexander and Wang, Yeping and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Safe Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation via Combined Model and Learning-based Control}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-072}
- }
- , "LIDIA: Localizing In the Dark with Illumination-Awareness toward Perception-Aware Planning", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-071 PDF
- @inproceedings{Velentzas2026jun,
- author = {Velentzas, Iason, G and Kento, Tomita},
- title = {{LIDIA: Localizing In the Dark with Illumination-Awareness toward Perception-Aware Planning}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-071}
- }
- , "Dexterous Non-prehensile Manipulation using Environment Guided Diffusion Models", ICRA Workshop on Dexterity with Multifingered Hands: Hardware, Sensing, and Skills, June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-073 PDF
- @inproceedings{Yao2026jun,
- author = {Yao, Shaoxiong and Xing, Chengy and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Dexterous Non-prehensile Manipulation using Environment Guided Diffusion Models}},
- booktitle = {ICRA Workshop on Dexterity with Multifingered Hands: Hardware, Sensing, and Skills},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-073}
- }
- , "PPGuide: Steering Diffusion Policies with Performance Predictive Guidance", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2026.BibTeX TR2026-066 PDF
- @inproceedings{Wang2026may2,
- author = {Wang, Zixing and Jha, Devesh K. and Qureshi , Ahmed H. and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{PPGuide: Steering Diffusion Policies with Performance Predictive Guidance}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-066}
- }
- , "UNIC: Learning Unified Multimodal Extrinsic Contact Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2026.BibTeX TR2026-065 PDF Video Data Software
- @inproceedings{Xu2026may,
- author = {Xu, Zhengtong and Shirai, Yuki},
- title = {{UNIC: Learning Unified Multimodal Extrinsic Contact Estimation}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2026,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-065}
- }
- , "GPU-Accelerated Continuous-Time Successive Convexification for Contact-Implicit Legged Locomotion", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), June 2026.
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Videos
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Software & Data Downloads
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Learning Unified Multimodal Extrinsic Contact Estimation -
SAmple Consensus for Adaptive Graduated Non-Convexity -
Lagrangian Inspired Polynomial for Robot Inverse Dynamics -
Monte Carlo Probabilistic Inference for Learning COntrol -
Python-based Robotic Control & Optimization Package -
Context-Aware Zero Shot Learning -
Online Feature Extractor Network -
Quasi-Newton Trust Region Policy Optimization -
Circular Maze Environment
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