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
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Abraham P.
Vinod
Chiori
Hori
Avishai
Weiss
Tim K.
Marks
Jonathan
Le Roux
Scott A.
Bortoff
Anoop
Cherian
Alexander
Schperberg
Ye
Wang
Bingnan
Wang
Matthew
Brand
Pedro
Miraldo
Philip V.
Orlik
Purnanand
Elango
Abraham
Goldsmith
Jianlin
Guo
Jing
Liu
Hassan
Mansour
Yoshiki
Masuyama
Saviz
Mowlavi
Zhaolin
Ren
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 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/.
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TALK [MERL Seminar Series 2026] Zac Manchester presents talk titled Is locomotion really that hard… and other musings on the virtues of simplicity Date & Time: Tuesday, January 20, 2026; 12:00 PM
Speaker: Zac Manchester, MIT
MERL Host: Pedro Miraldo
Research Areas: Computer Vision, Control, Optimization, RoboticsAbstract
For decades, legged locomotion was a challenging research topic in robotics. In the last few years, however, both model-based and reinforcement-learning approaches have not only demonstrated impressive performance in laboratory settings, but are now regularly deployed "in the wild." One surprising feature of these successful controllers is how simple they can be. Meanwhile, Art Bryson’s timeless advice to control engineers, “Be wise – linearize,” seems to be increasingly falling out of fashion and at risk of being forgotten by the next generation of practitioners. This talk will discuss several recent works from my group that try to push the limits of how simple locomotion (and, possibly, manipulation) controllers for general-purpose robots can be from several different viewpoints, while also making connections to state-of-the-art generative AI methods like diffusion policies.
See All News & Events for Robotics -
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Research Highlights
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Internships
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OR0239: Internship - Robot Learning and Perception for Disassembly
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SA0191: Internship - Human-Robot Interaction Based on Multimodal Scene Understanding
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CV0221: Internship - Robust Estimation for Computer Vision
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Openings
See All Openings at MERL -
Recent Publications
- , "Reinforcement Learning for Robust Athletic Intelligence: Lessons from the 2nd “AI Olympics with RealAIGym” Competition", IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, January 2026.BibTeX TR2026-013 PDF
- @article{Wiebe2026jan,
- author = {{{Wiebe, Felix and Turcato, Niccolò and Dalla Libera, Alberto and Seong Bjorn Choe, Jean and Choi, Bumkyu and Faust, Tim Lukas and Maraqten, Habib and Aghadavoodi, Erfan and Cali, Marco and Sinigaglia, Alberto and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego and Kim, Jong-kook and Susto, Gian Antonio and Vyas, Shubham and Mronga, Dennis and Belousov, Boris and Peters, Jan and Kirchner, Frank and Kumar, Shivesh}}},
- title = {{{Reinforcement Learning for Robust Athletic Intelligence: Lessons from the 2nd “AI Olympics with RealAIGym” Competition}}},
- journal = {IEEE Robotics \& Automation Magazine},
- year = 2026,
- month = jan,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-013}
- }
- , "Learning Non-prehensile Manipulation with Force and Vision Feedback Using Optimization-based Demonstrations", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, January 2026.BibTeX TR2026-011 PDF Video
- @article{Shirai2026jan,
- author = {Shirai, Yuki and Ota, Kei and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Learning Non-prehensile Manipulation with Force and Vision Feedback Using Optimization-based Demonstrations}},
- journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
- year = 2026,
- month = jan,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-011}
- }
- , "Real-time Human Progress Estimation with Online Dynamic Time Warping for Collaborative Robotics", Frontiers, December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-173 PDF
- @article{DeLazzari2025dec,
- author = {De Lazzari, Davide and Terreran, Matteo and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Jain, Siddarth and Falco, Pietro and Carli, Ruggero and Ghidoni, Stefano and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Real-time Human Progress Estimation with Online Dynamic Time Warping for Collaborative Robotics}},
- journal = {Frontiers},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-173}
- }
- , "Simultaneous Extrinsic Contact and In-Hand Pose Estimation via Distributed Tactile Sensing", IEEE RA-L, December 2025.BibTeX TR2026-002 PDF
- @article{VanderMerwe2025dec2,
- author = {Van der Merwe, Mark and Ota, Kei and Berenson, Dmitry and Fazeli, Nima and Jha, Devesh K.},
- title = {{Simultaneous Extrinsic Contact and In-Hand Pose Estimation via Distributed Tactile Sensing}},
- journal = {IEEE RA-L},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-002}
- }
- , "Motion Planning for Information Acquisition via Continuous-time Successive Convexification", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-170 PDF
- @inproceedings{Uzun2025dec,
- author = {Uzun, Samet and Acikmese, Behcet and {Di Cairano}, Stefano},
- title = {{Motion Planning for Information Acquisition via Continuous-time Successive Convexification}},
- booktitle = {IEEE Control Systems Letters},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-170}
- }
- , "Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM", IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-167 PDF
- @inproceedings{Hori2025dec,
- author = {Hori, Chiori and Masuyama, Yoshiki and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM}},
- booktitle = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-167}
- }
- , "Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch", Embodied World Models for Decision Making, NeurIPS Workshop, December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-169 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Shirai2025dec,
- author = {Shirai, Yuki and Ota, Kei and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch}},
- booktitle = {NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-169}
- }
- , "AxisBench: What Can Go Wrong in VLMs’ Spatial Reasoning?", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop, December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-168 PDF
- @inproceedings{Zhang2025dec2,
- author = {{{Zhang, Yuyou and Corcodel, Radu and Hori, Chiori and Cherian, Anoop and Zhao, Ding}}},
- title = {{{AxisBench: What Can Go Wrong in VLMs’ Spatial Reasoning?}}},
- booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-168}
- }
- , "Reinforcement Learning for Robust Athletic Intelligence: Lessons from the 2nd “AI Olympics with RealAIGym” Competition", IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, January 2026.
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Videos
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Software & Data Downloads
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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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