ll4ma Lab News Archive

December 18, 2020: Paper Published in IJRR: “A Model Predictive Approach for Online Mobile Manipulation of Nonholonomic Objects using Learned Dynamics”; Roya Sabbagh Novin, Amir Yazdani, Andrew Merryweather and Tucker Hermans. PDF

December 4, 2020: Roya successfully defended her PhD! Congratulations Dr. Sabbagh Novin!

November 12, 2020: Paper Accepted to International Conference on Operations Research and Enterprise Systems (ICORES) 2021: “Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls”; Sarvenaz Chaeibakhsh, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Tucker Hermans, Andrew Merryweather, and Alan Kuntz. [pdf coming soon!]

November 5, 2020: Tucker presented at the iCub Robotics Seminar at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT).

October 26, 2020: Paper Accepted to PLOS ONE: “Replicating dynamic humerus motion using an industrial robot”; Klevis Aliaj, Gentry Feeney, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Tucker Hermans, K. Bo Foremen, Kent N Bachus, Heath B. Henninger. [pdf coming soon!]

October 21, 2020: Paper Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics: “In-Hand Object-Dynamics Inference using Tactile Fingertips”; Balakumar Sundaralingam and Tucker Hermans preprint.

October 19, 2020: College of Engineering story on Roya's fall risk work.

Aug 28, 2020: Paper Accepted to Health Environments Research & Design Journal (HERD): “Development of a Novel Computational Model for Evaluating Fall Risk in Patient Room Design”; Roya Sabbagh Novin, Ellen Taylor, Tucker Hermans, Andrew Merryweather. PDF

Aug 6, 2020: Michael Bentley won a 2020 DDS&T Excellence in Publication Award in the Student Category for the work on the FLiT system he did at LLNL! Congratulations Mike!

July 29, 2020: Tucker gave a talk titled “Can common sense guide autonomous robot learning and exploration?” at the CogSci 2020 workshop on the Origins of Commonsense. video

June 30, 2020: Paper accepted to IROS 2020: “Multi-Fingered Active Grasp Learning”; Qingkai Lu, Mark Van der Merwe, and Tucker Hermans. preprint

June 29, 2020: Paper conditionally accepted to TRO: “In-Hand Object-Dynamics Inference using Tactile Fingertips”; Balakumar Sundaralingam and Tucker Hermans. preprint

June 10, 2020: Paper Accepted to ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (DSCC): “Autonomous Light Assessment Drone for Dark Skies Studies”; Matthew N. Goodell, Takara E. Truong, Stephanie R. Marston, Brett J. Smiley, Elliot R. Befus, Alex Bingham, Kent Allen, Joseph R. Bourne, Yi Wei, Kate E. Magargal, Vellachi Ganesan, Daniel L. Mendoza, Anil C. Seth, Stacy A. Harwood, Marc Bodson, Tucker Hermans and Kam K. Leang

May 28, 2020: Tucker presented at the UCSD Robotics Seminar.

April 16, 2020: Qingkai successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations Dr. Lu!

April 13, 2020: Our improved BioTac force estimation model is now public: repo

March 31, 2020: Mark Van der Merwe received an NSF GRFP Award!

March 23, 2020: Bala successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations Dr. Sundaralingam!

March 14, 2020: Paper Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering: Katharin Jensen-Nau, Tucker Hermans, and Kam K. Leang. “Near-Optimal Area-Coverage Path Planning of Energy Constrained Aerial Robots with Application in Autonomous Environmental Monitoring.”

February 20, 2020: Paper Accepted to IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine: “Multi-Fingered Grasp Planning via Inference in Deep Neural Networks”; Qingkai Lu, Mark Van der Merwe, Balakumar Sundaralingam, and Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf

January 24, 2020: Tucker presented at the University of Michigan Robotics Seminar. video

January 22, 2020: Paper Accepted to ICRA 2020, "Learning Continuous 3D Reconstructions for Geometrically Aware Grasping"; Mark Van der Merwe, Qingkai Lu, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Martin Matak, and Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf

December 17, 2019: Mark Van der Merwe was awarded Honorable Mention for the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award!

December 16, 2019: Paper Accepted to RA-L Special Issue: Benchmarking Protocols for Robotic Manipulation, "Benchmarking In-Hand Manipulation"; Silvia Cruciani, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Kaiyu Hang, Vikash Kumar, Tucker Hermans, and Danica Kragic. arxiv/PDF

November 1, 2019: Matthew Wilson's paper "Learning to Manipulate Object Collections Using Grounded State Representations" won the Best Systems Paper Award at CoRL 2019!

October 31, 2019: Paper Accepted to Scientific Reports (Special Collection: Soft Sensors and Actuators): “3D-Printing and Machine Learning Control of Soft Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite Actuators”; James D. Carrico, Tucker Hermans, Kwang J. Kim, and Kam K. Leang.

September 27, 2019: Tucker presented the RI Seminar at CMU. VIDEO

September 11, 2019: Tucker presented the Georgia Tech IRIM Seminar. VIDEO

September 7, 2019: Paper Accepted to CoRL 2019: “Learning to Manipulate Object Collections Using Grounded State Representations”; Matthew Wilson and Tucker Hermans. [PDF] [Project Page] [Video]

June 27, 2019: Paper accepted to RA-L: “Assembly Planning by Subassembly Decomposition Using Blocking Reduction”; James R. Watson and Tucker Hermans. PDF.

June 13, 2019: Paper accepted to ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference (DSCC) “Assembly Planning using a Multi-arm System for Polygonal Furniture”; Seth Payne, C. Fletcher Garrison IV, Steven E. Markhan, Tucker Hermans, and Kam K Leang. PDF.

April 30, 2019: Mark Van der Merwe received a UROP scholarship to work on his project “Grasp Planning in Clutter via Motion Planning Aware Optimization and 3D Object Reconstruction”.

April 2019: Tucker Hermans received a Non-Tenured Faculty Award from 3M!

March 24, 2019: Balakumar Sundaralingam's ICRA 2019 paper is a finalist for Best Paper in Robot Manipulation!

March 15, 2019: Proposal Awarded: Tucker was awarded an NSF CAREER Award entitled “Improving Multi-fingered Manipulation by Unifying Learning and Planning.”

January 7, 2019: Tucker appeared on Radioactive on KRCL to discuss robotics, AI, and mindfulness

January 3, 2019: Paper accepted to RA-L "Modeling Grasp Type Improves Learning-Based Grasp Planning"; Qingkai Lu and Tucker Hermans. PDF

December 17, 2018: Tucker gave a talk at NVIDIA Research, Seattle entitled “Improving Multi-fingered Robot Manipulation by Unifying Learning and Planning”

June 29, 2018: Paper accepted to IROS 2018 “Dynamics Model Learning and Manipulation Planning for Objects in Hospitals using a Patient Assistant Mobile (PAM) Robot”; Roya Sabbagh Novin, Amir Yazdani, Tucker Hermans, and Andrew Merryweather. PDF

May 22, 2018: Paper accepted to Autonomous Robots “Relaxed-Rigidity Constraints: Kinematic Trajectory Optimization and Collision Avoidance for In-Grasp Manipulation”; Balakumar Sundaralingam and Tucker Hermans. PDF; Publisher's Site.

May, 2018: Matthew Wilson received a UROP scholarship to work on his project “Learning Tactile Feedback Policies with Guided Policy Search for Robotic Manipulation”.

April 23, 2018: Paper accepted to IEEE Transactions on Haptics “Grip Stabilization of Novel Objects using Slip Prediction.”; Filipe Veiga, Jan Peters, and Tucker Hermans. PDF; Publisher's page.

April 10, 2018: Tucker presented a talk following a screening of AlphaGo at the Salt Lake City Public library. Details available at the Natural History Museum of Utah website.

January 11, 2018: Paper accepted to ICRA 2018 “Geometric In-Hand Regrasp Planning: Alternating Optimization of Finger Gaits and In-Grasp Manipulation.” Balakumar Sundaralingam, and Tucker Hermans. PDF

October 27, 2017: Tucker gave a talk at the University of Washington Robotics Colloquium entitled “Learning and Planning for Autonomous Multi-fingered Robot Manipulation”

September 24, 2017: Tucker gave a talk at the IROS 2017 Workshop on Development of Benchmarking Protocols for Robotic Manipulation on Benchmarking for Within-Hand Manipulation

September 4, 2017: Paper accepted to International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR) 2017 “Planning Multi-Fingered Grasps as Probabilistic Inference in a Learned Deep Network”; Qingkai Lu, Kautilya Chenna, Balakumar Sundaralingam, and Tucker Hermans; PDF.

June 1, 2017: Katie Popek's ICRA Paper won the Best Medical Robotics Paper Award!

April 2017: Paper accepted to RSS 2017: "Relaxed-Rigidity Constraints: In-Grasp Manipulation using Purely Kinematic Trajectory Optimization"; Balakumar Sundaralingam and Tucker Hermans. [Project page]

April 2017: Katie Popek's ICRA 2017 paper is a finalist for Best Medical Robotics Paper!

February 2017: Proposal Awarded: CRII: RI: Enabling Manipulation of Object Collections via Self-Supervised Robot Learning, Tucker Hermans (PI)

03/27–03/39/2017: Tucker attended the AAAI Spring Symposium on Interactive Multi-Sensory Object Perception for Embodied Agents

02/23/2017: Proposal Awarded: CRII: RI: Enabling Manipulation of Object Collections via Self-Supervised Robot Learning, Tucker Hermans (PI

January 2017: Paper accepted to ICRA 2017: "First Demonstration of Simultaneous Localization and Propulsion of a Magnetic Capsule in a Lumen using a Single Rotating Magnet." Katie M. Popek, Tucker Hermans, and Jake J. Abbott

10/12/2016: Tucker visited Idaho National Laboratory to view robots being used for handling of nuclear material at the DOE research facility; Host: Tony Crawford

08/7–08/09/2016: Tucker attended the New Computer Science Faculty Teaching Workshop at UCSD

07/01/2016: Paper accepted (Oral) to IROS 2016: “Active Tactile Object Exploration with Gaussian Processes.” Zhengkun Yi, Roberto Calandra, Herke van Hoof, Filipe Veiga, Tucker Hermans, Yilei Zhang, and Jan Peters.

01/11/2016: Tucker gave a Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar Talk at BYU on Visual and Tactile Learning for Manipulation