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
Devesh K.
Jha
Diego
Romeres
Daniel N.
Nikovski
Arvind
Raghunathan
Stefano
Di Cairano
Siddarth
Jain
William S.
Yerazunis
Radu
Corcodel
Yebin
Wang
Yuki
Shirai
Toshiaki
Koike-Akino
Abraham P.
Vinod
Avishai
Weiss
Tim K.
Marks
Chiori
Hori
Scott A.
Bortoff
Jonathan
Le Roux
Ye
Wang
Anoop
Cherian
Matthew
Brand
Philip V.
Orlik
Alexander
Schperberg
Bingnan
Wang
Purnanand
Elango
Abraham
Goldsmith
Jianlin
Guo
Jing
Liu
Hassan
Mansour
Pedro
Miraldo
Saviz
Mowlavi
Anthony
Vetro
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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; 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 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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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.
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NEWS Yuki Shirai appointed as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). Date: March 4, 2025
Where: IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS)
MERL Contact: Yuki Shirai
Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, RoboticsBrief- MERL researcher, Yuki Shirai, has been appointed to the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) as an Associate Editor.
IEEE RA-L publishes peer-reviewed articles in the areas of robotics and automation which can also be presented at the annual flagship conferences of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), including IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
- MERL researcher, Yuki Shirai, has been appointed to the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) as an Associate Editor.
See All News & Events for Robotics -
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Internships
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CA0148: Internship - Motion Planning and Control for Autonomous Articulated Vehicles
MERL is seeking an outstanding intern to collaborate in the development of motion planning and control for autonomous articulated vehicles. The ideal candidate is expected to be working towards a PhD in electrical, mechanical, aerospace engineering, robotics, control or related areas, with a strong emphasis on motion planning and control, possibly with applications to ground vehicles, to have experience in at least some of path/motion planning algorithms (A*, D*, graph-search) and optimization-based control (e.g., model predictive control), to have excellent coding skills in MATLAB/Simulink and a strong publication record. The expected start date is the Spring/Early Summer 2025 and the expected duration is 6-9 months, depending on candidate availability and interests.
Required Specific Experience
- Path/motion planning algorithms (A*, D*, graph-search)
- Nonlinear model predictive control
- Programming in Matlab/Simulink
- Applications to mobile robots or vehicles
Additional Useful Experience
- Nonlinear MPC Design in CasADi
- Code generation tools and dSPACE
- Applications to autonomous vehicles and articulated vehicles
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CV0075: Internship - Multimodal Embodied AI
MERL is looking for a self-motivated intern to work on problems at the intersection of multimodal large language models and embodied AI in dynamic indoor environments. The ideal candidate would be a PhD student with a strong background in machine learning and computer vision, as demonstrated by top-tier publications. The candidate must have prior experience in designing synthetic scenes (e.g., 3D games) using popular graphics software, embodied AI, large language models, reinforcement learning, and the use of simulators such as Habitat/SoundSpaces. Hands on experience in using animated 3D human shape models (e.g., SMPL and variants) is desired. The intern is expected to collaborate with researchers in computer vision at MERL to develop algorithms and prepare manuscripts for scientific publications.
Required Specific Experience
- Experience in designing 3D interactive scenes
- Experience with vision based embodied AI using simulators (implementation on real robotic hardware would be a plus).
- Experience training large language models on multimodal data
- Experience with training reinforcement learning algorithms
- Strong foundations in machine learning and programming
- Strong track record of publications in top-tier computer vision and machine learning venues (such as CVPR, NeurIPS, etc.).
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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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Openings
See All Openings at MERL -
Recent Publications
- "PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.BibTeX TR2025-064 PDF
- @inproceedings{DeLazzari2025may,
- author = {De Lazzari, Davide and Terreran, Matteo and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Jain, Siddarth and Falco, Pietro and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2025,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-064}
- }
, - "Simultaneous Collision Detection and Force Estimation for Dynamic Quadrupedal Locomotion", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.BibTeX TR2025-063 PDF
- @inproceedings{Zhou2025may,
- author = {Zhou, Ziyi and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Wang, Yebin and Berntorp, Karl},
- title = {{Simultaneous Collision Detection and Force Estimation for Dynamic Quadrupedal Locomotion}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
- year = 2025,
- month = may,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-063}
- }
, - "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}
- }
, - "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}
- }
, - "Learning global control of underactuated double pendulum with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - 3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym Competition, April 2025.BibTeX TR2025-046 PDF
- @inproceedings{Turcato2025apr,
- author = {Turcato, Niccolò and Cali, Marco and Dalla Libera, Alberto and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
- title = {{Learning global control of underactuated double pendulum with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - 3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym Competition},
- year = 2025,
- month = apr,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-046}
- }
, - "Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 2025.BibTeX TR2025-034 PDF
- @inproceedings{Hori2025mar,
- author = {Hori, Chiori and Kambara, Motonari and Sugiura, Komei and Ota, Kei and Khurana, Sameer and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
- title = {{Interactive Robot Action Replanning using Multimodal LLM Trained from Human Demonstration Videos}},
- booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
- year = 2025,
- month = mar,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-034}
- }
, - "Learning Visual Servoing for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots with Uncalibrated Cameras", The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing, March 2025.BibTeX TR2025-042 PDF
- @inproceedings{Wang2025mar2,
- author = {Wang, Jen-Wei and Nikovski, Daniel N.},
- title = {{Learning Visual Servoing for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots with Uncalibrated Cameras}},
- booktitle = {The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing},
- year = 2025,
- month = mar,
- url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-042}
- }
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- "PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 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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