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
Diego
Romeres
Daniel N.
Nikovski
Stefano
Di Cairano
Siddarth
Jain
Arvind
Raghunathan
Radu
Corcodel
Yebin
Wang
William S.
Yerazunis
Yuki
Shirai
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Abraham P.
Vinod
Chiori
Hori
Avishai
Weiss
Tim K.
Marks
Jonathan
Le Roux
Scott A.
Bortoff
Alexander
Schperberg
Ye
Wang
Anoop
Cherian
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 University of Padua and MERL team wins the AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS24 Date: October 17, 2024
Awarded to: Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- The team composed of the control group at the University of Padua and MERL's Optimization and Robotic team ranked 1st out of the 4 finalist teams that arrived to the 2nd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS 24, which focused on control of under-actuated robots. The team was composed by Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli and Diego Romeres. The competition was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Technical University of Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology.
The competition and award ceremony was hosted by IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) on October 17, 2024 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Diego Romeres presented the team's method, based on a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm called MC-PILCO.
- The team composed of the control group at the University of Padua and MERL's Optimization and Robotic team ranked 1st out of the 4 finalist teams that arrived to the 2nd AI Olympics with RealAIGym competition at IROS 24, which focused on control of under-actuated robots. The team was composed by Niccolò Turcato, Alberto Dalla Libera, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli and Diego Romeres. The competition was organized by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Technical University of Darmstadt and Chalmers University of Technology.
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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; 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 Joint University of Padua-MERL team wins Challenge 'AI Olympics With RealAIGym' Date: August 25, 2023
Awarded to: Alberto Dalla Libera, Niccolo' Turcato, Giulio Giacomuzzo, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, RoboticsBrief- A joint team consisting of members of University of Padua and MERL ranked 1st in the IJCAI2023 Challenge "Al Olympics With RealAlGym: Is Al Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World?". The team was composed by MERL researcher Diego Romeres and a team from University Padua (UniPD) consisting of Alberto Dalla Libera, Ph.D., Ph.D. Candidates: Niccolò Turcato, Giulio Giacomuzzo and Prof. Ruggero Carli from University of Padua.
The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) is a premier gathering for AI researchers and organizes several competitions. This year the competition CC7 "AI Olympics With RealAIGym: Is AI Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World?" consisted of two stages: simulation and real-robot experiments on two under-actuated robotic systems. The two robotics systems were treated as separate tracks and one final winner was selected for each track based on specific performance criteria in the control tasks.
The UniPD-MERL team competed and won in both tracks. The team's system made strong use of a Model-based Reinforcement Learning algorithm called (MC-PILCO) that we recently published in the journal IEEE Transaction on Robotics.
- A joint team consisting of members of University of Padua and MERL ranked 1st in the IJCAI2023 Challenge "Al Olympics With RealAlGym: Is Al Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World?". The team was composed by MERL researcher Diego Romeres and a team from University Padua (UniPD) consisting of Alberto Dalla Libera, Ph.D., Ph.D. Candidates: Niccolò Turcato, Giulio Giacomuzzo and Prof. Ruggero Carli from University of Padua.
See All Awards for Robotics -
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News & Events
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NEWS Abraham Vinod Delivers Invited Talks at The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Dallas Date: November 11, 2025 - November 13, 2025
MERL Contact: Abraham P. Vinod
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researcher Abraham Vinod was invited to present MERL's latest research at the University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas at Dallas this November. His talk discussed a tractable set-based method for a broad class of robust control problems with nonlinear dynamics and bounded uncertainty, with applications to powered descent guidance and drone motion planning problems. Additionally, he also presented MERL's recent research on environmental monitoring using hetereogenous robots, with applications in disaster management and search-and-rescue.
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NEWS Diego Romeres Delivers Invited Talks at Fraunhofer Italia and the University of Padua Date: July 16, 2025 - July 18, 2025
MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Human-Computer InteractionBrief- MERL researcher Diego Romeres was invited to present MERL's latest research at two institutions in Italy this July, focusing on human-robot collaboration and LLM-driven assembly systems.
On July 16th, Dr. Romeres delivered a talk titled “Human-Robot Collaborative Assembly” at Fraunhofer Italia – Innovation Engineering Center (EIC) in Bolzano. His presentation showcased research on human-robot collaboration for efficient and flexible assembly processes. Fraunhofer Italia EIC is a non-profit research institute focused on enabling digital and sustainable transformation through applied innovation in close collaboration with both public and private sectors.
Two days later, on July 18th, Dr. Romeres was hosted by the University of Padua, one of Europe’s oldest and most renowned universities. His invited lecture, “Robot Assembly through Human Collaboration & Large Language Models”, explored how artificial intelligence can enhance human-robot synergy in complex assembly tasks.
- MERL researcher Diego Romeres was invited to present MERL's latest research at two institutions in Italy this July, focusing on human-robot collaboration and LLM-driven assembly systems.
See All News & Events for Robotics -
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Research Highlights
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Internships
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CI0197: Internship - Embodied AI & Humanoid Robotics
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OR0164: Internship - Robotic 6D grasp pose estimation
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OR0239: Internship - Robot Learning and Perception for Disassembly
See All Internships for Robotics -
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Openings
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CA0093: Research Scientist - Control for Autonomous Systems
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CI0177: Postdoctoral Research Fellow - Agentic AI
See All Openings at MERL -
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Recent Publications
- , "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 Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
- 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
- @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 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}
- }
- , "In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making, December 2025.BibTeX TR2025-163 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{VanderMerwe2025dec,
- author = {Van der Merwe, Mark and Jha, Devesh K.},
- title = {{In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation}},
- booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making},
- year = 2025,
- month = dec,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-163}
- }
- , "DamageEst: Accurate Estimation of Damage for Repair using Additive Manufacturing", Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF), November 2025.BibTeX TR2025-158 PDF Presentation
- @inproceedings{Gambill2025nov,
- author = {{{Gambill, Patrick and Jha, Devesh K. and Krishnamoorthy, Bala and Raghunathan, Arvind and Yerazunis, William S.}}},
- title = {{{DamageEst: Accurate Estimation of Damage for Repair using Additive Manufacturing}}},
- booktitle = {Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium (SFF)},
- year = 2025,
- month = nov,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-158}
- }
- , "Observation-Based Inverse Kinematics for Visual Servo Control", 22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO), October 2025.BibTeX TR2025-153 PDF
- @inproceedings{Nikovski2025oct,
- author = {Nikovski, Daniel N.},
- title = {{Observation-Based Inverse Kinematics for Visual Servo Control}},
- booktitle = {22nd International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO)},
- year = 2025,
- month = oct,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-153}
- }
- , "Analytic Conditions for Differentiable Collision Detection in Trajectory Optimization", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), DOI: 10.1109/IROS60139.2025.11246568, October 2025, pp. 6659-6666.BibTeX TR2025-150 PDF Video
- @inproceedings{Jaitly2025oct,
- author = {Jaitly, Akshay and Jha, Devesh K. and Ota, Kei and Shirai, Yuki},
- title = {{Analytic Conditions for Differentiable Collision Detection in Trajectory Optimization}},
- booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
- year = 2025,
- pages = {6659--6666},
- month = oct,
- doi = {10.1109/IROS60139.2025.11246568},
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-150}
- }
- , "Motion Planning for Information Acquisition via Continuous-time Successive Convexification", IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2025.
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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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