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
Abraham P.
Vinod
Chiori
Hori
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Avishai
Weiss
Alexander
Schperberg
Anoop
Cherian
Tim K.
Marks
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 researchers present 9 papers at IEEE ICRA 2026 Date: June 1, 2026 - June 5, 2026
Where: Vienna, Austria
MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Purnanand Elango; Siddarth Jain; Alexander Schperberg; Kento Tomita
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers presented nine papers at the recently concluded IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna, Austria. The papers covered a broad set of topics in robotics, including robot perception, visuo-tactile sensing, contact and pose estimation, manipulation, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, loco-manipulation, contact-implicit trajectory optimization, legged locomotion, localization, and perception-aware planning.
IEEE ICRA is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts nearly 8,000 participants and receives more than 5,000 paper submissions.
- MERL researchers presented nine papers at the recently concluded IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2026 in Vienna, Austria. The papers covered a broad set of topics in robotics, including robot perception, visuo-tactile sensing, contact and pose estimation, manipulation, reinforcement learning, diffusion policies, loco-manipulation, contact-implicit trajectory optimization, legged locomotion, localization, and perception-aware planning.
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NEWS MERL researchers present 8 papers at ACC 2026 Date: May 26, 2026 - May 29, 2026
Where: New Orleans, USA
MERL Contacts: Scott A. Bortoff; Vedang M. Deshpande; Stefano Di Cairano; Christopher R. Laughman; Jordan Leung; Hongtao Qiao; Zhaolin Ren; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researchers presented 8 papers at the recently concluded American Control Conference (ACC) 2026 in New Orleans, USA. The papers covered a wide range of topics including robust controllable set computation, vapor compression cycle calibration, task-reasoning LLM agents, Minkowski-cost stable MPC, polynomial chaos approximation, invariant-set motion planning, heat-pump MPC architectures, and relaxed barrier-function MPC. Additionally, Zhaolin Ren was an invited speaker at Multi-Agent Dynamic Games workshop, and Abraham Vinod served as a panelist at the Professional Development and Career Advice for Young Professionals session.
As a sponsor of the conference, MERL maintained a booth for open discussions with researchers and students, and hosted a special session to discuss highlights of MERL research and work philosophy.
- MERL researchers presented 8 papers at the recently concluded American Control Conference (ACC) 2026 in New Orleans, USA. The papers covered a wide range of topics including robust controllable set computation, vapor compression cycle calibration, task-reasoning LLM agents, Minkowski-cost stable MPC, polynomial chaos approximation, invariant-set motion planning, heat-pump MPC architectures, and relaxed barrier-function MPC. Additionally, Zhaolin Ren was an invited speaker at Multi-Agent Dynamic Games workshop, and Abraham Vinod served as a panelist at the Professional Development and Career Advice for Young Professionals session.
See All News & Events for Robotics -
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Research Highlights
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Internships
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CA0283: Internship - Active SLAM for Aerial Robots
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CV0075: Internship - Multimodal Embodied AI
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SA0191: Internship - Human-Robot Interaction Based on Multimodal Scene Understanding
See All Internships for Robotics -
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Openings
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OR0293: Research Scientist - Robotics
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CI0177: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Agentic AI
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OR0294: Research Scientist - Robotics Team Leader
See All Openings at MERL -
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Recent Publications
- , "MIRROR: Multisensory Implicit Rejection-sampled RObotic policy", ICML 2026 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling, July 2026.BibTeX TR2026-096 PDF
- @inproceedings{Bhaskar2026jul,
- author = {Bhaskar, Amisha and Tokekar, Pratap and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Schperberg, Alexander},
- title = {{MIRROR: Multisensory Implicit Rejection-sampled RObotic policy}},
- booktitle = {ICML 2026 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference \& Generative Modeling},
- year = 2026,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-096}
- }
- , "Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones", World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), July 2026.BibTeX TR2026-101 PDF
- @inproceedings{Folorunsho2026jul,
- author = {Folorunsho, Samuel and Hayner, Christopher and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{Coordinated aerial inspection of infrastructure with heterogeneous drones}},
- booktitle = {World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jul,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-101}
- }
- , "Closed-Loop Co-Design of Motors, Motions, and Feedback Control for Robotic Manipulators", Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Automation, DOI: 10.53941/jaia.2026.100008, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-088 PDF
- @article{Lin2026jun2,
- author = {Lin, Jue-Te and Lu, Zehui and Wang, Yebin},
- title = {{Closed-Loop Co-Design of Motors, Motions, and Feedback Control for Robotic Manipulators}},
- journal = {Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Automation},
- year = 2026,
- volume = 1,
- number = 2,
- month = jun,
- doi = {10.53941/jaia.2026.100008},
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-088}
- }
- , "Pose-Based Visual Servocontrol with Keypoint Tracking", The 15th Asian Control Conference (ASCC), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-082 PDF
- @inproceedings{Deng2026jun,
- author = {Deng, Yunfu and Chatterjee, Sreejani and Taylor, Nichols and Nikovski, Daniel N.},
- title = {{Pose-Based Visual Servocontrol with Keypoint Tracking}},
- booktitle = {The 15th Asian Control Conference (ASCC)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-082}
- }
- , "LLawCo: Learning Laws of Cooperation for Modeling Embodied Multi-Agent Behavior", International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-081 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Zhou2026jun,
- author = {Zhou, Qinhong and Gan, Chuang and Cherian, Anoop},
- title = {{LLawCo: Learning Laws of Cooperation for Modeling Embodied Multi-Agent Behavior}},
- booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-081}
- }
- , "Data-driven Spatial Classification using Multi-Arm Bandits for Monitoring with Energy-Constrained Mobile Robots", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, June 2026.BibTeX TR2026-078 PDF Video
- @article{Lin2026jun,
- author = {Lin, Xiaoshan and Nayak, Siddharth and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Vinod, Abraham P.},
- title = {{Data-driven Spatial Classification using Multi-Arm Bandits for Monitoring with Energy-Constrained Mobile Robots}},
- journal = {IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology},
- year = 2026,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-078}
- }
- , "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}
- }
- , "MIRROR: Multisensory Implicit Rejection-sampled RObotic policy", ICML 2026 Workshop on Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling, July 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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