Devesh K. Jha
- Phone: 617-621-7513
- Email:
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Position:
Research / Technical Staff
Senior Principal Research Scientist -
Education:
Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 2016 -
Research Areas:
External Links:
Devesh's Quick Links
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Biography
Devesh's PhD Thesis was on decision & control of autonomous systems. He also got a Master's degree in Mathematics from Penn State. His research interests are in the areas of Machine Learning, Time Series Analytics and Robotics. He was a recipient of the best student paper award at the 1st ACM SIGKDD workshop on Machine Learning for Prognostics and Health Management at KDD 2016, San Francisco.
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Recent News & Events
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NEWS MERL contributes to ICRA 2025 Date: May 19, 2025 - May 23, 2025
Where: IEEE ICRA
MERL Contacts: Stefano Di Cairano; Jianlin Guo; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Philip V. Orlik; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Human-Computer InteractionBrief- MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from May 19th to May 23rd.
MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and MERL researchers chaired four sessions in the areas of Manipulation Planning, Human-Robot Collaboration, Diffusion Policy, and Learning for Robot Control.
MERL researchers presented four papers in the main conference on the topics of contact-implicit trajectory optimization, proactive robotic assistance in human-robot collaboration, diffusion policy with human preferences, and dynamic and model learning of robotic manipulators. In addition, five more papers were presented in the workshops: “Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots,” “Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Long-term Human Motion Prediction,” and “The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From Innovation to Implementation.”
MERL researcher Diego Romeres delivered an invited talk titled “Dexterous Robotics: From Multimodal Sensing to Real-World Physical Interactions.”
MERL also collaborated with the University of Padua on one of the conference’s challenges: the “3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym” (https://ai-olympics.dfki-bremen.de).
During the conference, MERL researchers received the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award for their paper titled “Smart Actuation for End-Edge Industrial Control Systems.”
About ICRA
The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (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 over 7,000 participants, 143 partners and exhibitors, and receives more than 4,000 paper submissions.
- MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from May 19th to May 23rd.
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EVENT MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025 Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
Location: Hyderabad, India
MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; François Germain; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & AudioBrief- MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
Sponsorship
MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.
MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.
Technical Program
MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.
MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.
Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".
About ICASSP
ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
- MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.
See All News & Events for Devesh -
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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; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
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 Contacts: Devesh K. Jha; Arvind Raghunathan; Yuki Shirai
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.
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AWARD MERL Researcher Devesh Jha Wins the Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award 2019 Date: October 10, 2019
Awarded to: Devesh Jha, Nurali Virani, Zhenyuan Yuan, Ishana Shekhawat and Asok Ray
MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- MERL researcher Devesh Jha has won the Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award 2019 for the paper entitled "Imitation of Demonstrations Using Bayesian Filtering With Nonparametric Data-Driven Models". This paper, published in a Special Commemorative Issue for Rudolf E. Kalman in the ASME JDSMC in March 2018, uses Bayesian filtering for imitation learning in Hidden Mode Hybrid Systems. This award is given annually by the Dynamic Systems and Control Division of ASME to the authors of the best paper published in the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems Measurement and Control during the preceding year.
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Internships with Devesh
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OR0115: Internship - Whole-body dexterous manipulation
MERL is looking for a highly motivated individual to work on whole-body dexterous manipulation. The research will develop robot motor skills for whole-body, dexterous manipulation using optimization and/or learning algorithms. The ideal candidate should have experience in either one or multiple of the following topics: Optimization Algorithms for contact systems, Reinforcement Learning, control through contacts, and Behavioral cloning. Senior PhD students in robotics and engineering with a focus on contact-rich manipulation are encouraged to apply. Prior experience working with physical robotic systems (and vision and tactile sensors) is required as results need to be implemented on a physical hardware. Good coding skills in Python ML libraries like PyTorch etc. and/or relevant Optimization packages is required. A successful internship will result in submission of results to a peer-reviewed robotics journal in collaboration with MERL researchers. The expected duration of internship is 4-5 months with start date in May/June 2025. This internship is preferred to be onsite at MERL.
Required Specific Experience
- Prior experience working with physical hardware system is required.
- Prior publication experience in robotics venues like ICRA,RSS, CoRL.
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MERL Publications
- , "RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation", R3: Reasoning for Robust Robot Manipulation in the Open World Workshop at R:SS 2025, June 2025.BibTeX TR2025-091 PDF
- @inproceedings{Vats2025jun,
- author = {Vats, Shivam and Jha, Devesh K. and Likhachev, Maxim and Kroemer, Oliver and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation}},
- booktitle = {R3: Reasoning for Robust Robot Manipulation in the Open World Workshop at R:SS 2025},
- year = 2025,
- month = jun,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-091}
- }
- , "High-Accuracy Tactile Pose Estimation for Connector Assembly", ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”, May 2025.BibTeX TR2025-057 PDF
- @inproceedings{Bronars2025may,
- author = {Bronars, Antonia and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K.},
- title = {{High-Accuracy Tactile Pose Estimation for Connector Assembly}},
- booktitle = {ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”},
- year = 2025,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-057}
- }
- , "FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.BibTeX TR2025-053 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Chen2025may,
- author = {Chen, Yuxin and Jha, Devesh K. and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2025,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-053}
- }
- , "Hierarchical Contact-Rich Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Modal Manipulation using Tight Convex Relaxations", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.BibTeX TR2025-052 PDF
- @inproceedings{Shirai2025may,
- author = {Shirai, Yuki and Raghunathan, Arvind and Jha, Devesh K.},
- title = {{Hierarchical Contact-Rich Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Modal Manipulation using Tight Convex Relaxations}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2025,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-052}
- }
- , "Simultaneous Trajectory Optimization and Contact Selection for Contact-rich Manipulation with High-Fidelity Geometry", IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), April 2025.BibTeX TR2025-047 PDF
- @article{Zhang2025apr,
- author = {Zhang, Mengchao and Jha, Devesh K. and Raghunathan, Arvind and Hauser, Kris},
- title = {{Simultaneous Trajectory Optimization and Contact Selection for Contact-rich Manipulation with High-Fidelity Geometry}},
- journal = {IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)},
- year = 2025,
- month = apr,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-047}
- }
- , "RecoveryChaining: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Robust Manipulation", R3: Reasoning for Robust Robot Manipulation in the Open World Workshop at R:SS 2025, June 2025.
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Software & Data Downloads
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Videos
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MERL Issued Patents
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Title: "System and Method for Controlling a Robot using Constrained Dynamic Movement Primitives"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Shaw, Seiji; Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Romeres, Diego; Nikovski, Daniel N.
Patent No.: 12,343,876
Issue Date: Jul 1, 2025 -
Title: "System and Method for Controlling an Operation of a Manipulation System"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Shirai, Yuki
Patent No.: 12,343,875
Issue Date: Jul 1, 2025 -
Title: "System and Method for Controlling a Motion of a Robot"
Inventors: Lin, Chungwei; Wang, Yebin; Quirynen, Rien; Jha, Devesh; Wang, Bingnan; Vetterling, William; Jain, Siddarth; Bortoff, Scott A.
Patent No.: 12,257,718
Issue Date: Mar 25, 2025 -
Title: "System and Method for Polytopic Policy Optimization for Robust Feedback Control During Learning"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Chakrabarty, Ankush
Patent No.: 12,124,230
Issue Date: Oct 22, 2024 -
Title: "System and Method for Robust Robotic Manipulation using Chance Constrained Optimization"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 12,049,007
Issue Date: Jul 30, 2024 -
Title: "System for Performing a Task According to a Reference Trajectory"
Inventors: Benosman, Mouhacine; Jha, Devesh
Patent No.: 12,038,727
Issue Date: Jul 16, 2024 -
Title: "OBJECT MANIPULATION WITH COLLISION AVOIDANCE USING COMPLEMENTARITY CONSTRAINTS"
Inventors: Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Jha, Devesh; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,883,962
Issue Date: Jan 30, 2024 -
Title: "System and Method for Robotic Assembly Based on Adaptive Compliance"
Inventors: Nikovski, Daniel N.; Romeres, Diego; Jha, Devesh; Yerazunis, William S.
Patent No.: 11,673,264
Issue Date: Jun 13, 2023 -
Title: "System and Method for Policy Optimization using Quasi-Newton Trust Region Method"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Raghunathan, Arvind U; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,650,551
Issue Date: May 16, 2023 -
Title: "System and Design of Derivative-free Model Learning for Robotic Systems"
Inventors: Romeres, Diego; Libera, Alberto Dalla; Jha, Devesh; Nikovski, Daniel Nikolaev
Patent No.: 11,389,957
Issue Date: Jul 19, 2022 -
Title: "System and Method for Automatic Error Recovery in Robotic Assembly"
Inventors: Nikovski, Daniel Nikolaev; Jha, Devesh; Romeres, Diego
Patent No.: 11,161,244
Issue Date: Nov 2, 2021 -
Title: "Predictive Classification of Future Operations"
Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Zhang, Wenyu; Laftchiev, Emil; Nikovski, Daniel N.
Patent No.: 10,996,664
Issue Date: May 4, 2021 -
Title: "System and Method for Control Constrained Operation of Machine with Partially Unmodeled Dynamics Using Lipschitz Constant"
Inventors: Chakrabarty, Ankush; Jha, Devesh; Wang, Yebin
Patent No.: 10,895,854
Issue Date: Jan 19, 2021 -
Title: "Vehicle Automated Parking System and Method"
Inventors: Wang, Yebin; Jha, Devesh
Patent No.: 9,969,386
Issue Date: May 15, 2018
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Title: "System and Method for Controlling a Robot using Constrained Dynamic Movement Primitives"
