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Utah Learning Lab for Manipulation Autonomy
Welcome to the Utah Learning Lab for Manipulation Autonomy–the LL4MA Lab–directed by professor Tucker Hermans. We are part of the Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah Robotics Center, and the Utah Center for Data Science at the University of Utah.
Our research focuses on autonomous learning, planning, and perception for robot manipulation. We are particularly interested in enabling robots to autonomously discover and manipulate objects with which they have no previous knowledge or experience.
For more information about specific research efforts check out our projects and publications.
If you are a student interested in working with us, please read this prior to contacting Prof. Hermans.
News
- April 23, 2025: Paper Accepted to RSS 2025: "Differentiable GPU-Parallelized Task and Motion Planning"; William Shen, Caelan Garrett, Nishanth Kumar, Ankit Goyal, Tucker Hermans, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, and Fabio Ramos.
- January 27, 2025: Paper Accepted to ICRA 2025 : "Points2Plans: From Point Clouds to Long-Horizon Plans with Composable Relational Dynamics"; Yixuan Huang, Christopher Agia, Jimmy Wu, Tucker Hermans, Jeannette Bohg.
- October 5, 2024: Paper Accepted to International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR): Magnetic Manipulation of Unknown and Complex Conductive Nonmagnetic Objects with Application in the Remediation of Space Debris; Griffin F. Tabor, Lan N. Pham, Jake J. Abbot, Tucker Hermans
- September 4, 2024: Paper Accepted to CoRL 2024: DextrAH-G: Pixels-to-Action Dexterous Arm-Hand Grasping with Geometric Fabrics; Martin Matak*, Tyler Ga Wei Lum*, Viktor Makoviychuk, Ankur Handa, Arthur Allshire, Tucker Hermans, Nathan D. Ratliff, Karl Van Wyk
- July 23, 2024: Paper Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO): "Position Regulation of a Conductive Nonmagnetic Object with Two Stationary Field Sources"; Devin Dalton, Griffin Tabor, Tucker Hermans, and Jake J. Abbott.
- June 30, 2024: 2 Papers Accepted to IROS 2024:
- "V-PRISM: Probabilistic Mapping of Unknown Tabletop Scenes"; Herbert Wright, Weiming Zhi, Matthew Johnson-Roberson, and Tucker Hermans.
- "L4KDE: Learning for Kinodynamic Tree Expansion"; Tin Lai, Weiming Zhi, Tucker Hermans, and Fabio Ramos.
- January 29, 2024: 3 Papers Accepted to ICRA 2024:
- “DefGoalNet: Contextual Goal Learning from Demonstrations For Deformable Object Manipulation”; Bao Thach, Tanner Watts, Shing-Hei Ho, Tucker Hermans, Alan Kuntz
- "Out of Sight, Still in Mind: Reasoning and Planning about Unobserved Objects with Video Tracking Enabled Memory Models"; Yixuan Huang, Jialin Yuan, Chanho Kim, Pupul Pradhan, Bryan Chen, Li Fuxin, Tucker Hermans.
- "Point Cloud Models Improve Visual Robustness in Robotic Learners"; Skand Peri, Iain Lee, Chanho Kim, Li Fuxin, Tucker Hermans, Stefan Lee.
- January 19, 2024: Paper Accepted to IEEE RA-L: “Pick and Place Planning is Better than Pick Planning then Place Planning”; Mohanraj Devendran Shanthi, Tucker Hermans.
- January 3, 2024: Paper Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO): “Latent Space Planning for Multi-Object Manipulation with Environment-Aware Relational Classifiers”; Yixuan Huang, Nichols Crawford Taylor, Adam Conkey, Weiyu Liu, and Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf
- September 11, 2023: 2 Workshop papers accepted to IROS 2023 Workshop on Differentiable Probabilistic Robotics: Emerging Perspectives on Robot Learning:
- “Adaptive Magnetic Control using Stein Variational Gradient Descent computed Distribution of Object Parameters”; Griffin Tabor, Tucker Hermans.
- “Probabilistic Pick and Place Planning instead of Pick then Place Planning”; Mohanraj Devendran Shanthi, Tucker Hermans.
- Aug 30, 2023: 2 Papers Accepted to CoRL 2023:
- "Composable Part-Based Manipulation"; Weiyu Liu, Jiayuan Mao, Joy Hsu, Tucker Hermans, Animesh Garg, Jiajun Wu.
- "Ready, Set, Plan! Planning to Goal Sets Using Generalized Bayesian Inference"; Jana Pavlasek, Stanley Robert Lewis, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Fabio Ramos, Tucker Hermans.
- Aug 8, 2023: Workshop paper accepted to IROS 2023 Workshop on Causality for Robotics: Answering the Question of Why : “Latent Space Planning for Unobserved Objects with Environment-Aware Relational Classifiers”; Yixuan Huang, Jialin Yuan, Weiyu Liu, Chanho Kim, Fuxin Li, Tucker Hermans.
- May 13, 2023: Workshop paper accepted to ICRA 2023 Workshop on Geometric Representations: “23 DoF Grasping Policies from a Raw Point Cloud”; Martin Matak, Karl Van Wyk, Tucker Hermans
- April 23, 2023: Paper Accepted to RSS 2023: “StructDiffusion: Language-Guided Creation of Physically-Valid Structures using Unseen Objects” Weiyu Liu, Yilun Du, Tucker Hermans, Sonia Chernova, Chris Paxton.
- January 16, 2023: 2 Papers Accepted to ICRA 2023:
- “Planning for Multi-Object Manipulation with Graph Neural Network Relational Classifiers”; Yixuan Huang, Adam Conkey, and Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf
- “DefGraspNets: Grasp Planning on 3D Fields with Graph Neural Nets”; Isabella Huang, Yashraj Narang, Ruzena Bajcsy, Fabio Ramos, Tucker Hermans, and Dieter Fox.
- December 14, 2022: Paper Accepted to RA-L “Planning Visual-Tactile Precision Grasps via Complementary Use of Vision and Touch”; Martin Matak and Tucker Hermans arxiv/pdf
- November 15, 2022: Paper Accepted to CoRL LangRob Workshop "StructDiffusion: Object-Centric Diffusion for Semantic Rearrangement of Novel Objects"; Weiyu Liu, Tucker Hermans, Sonia Chernova, Chris Paxton.
- August 19, 2022: Amir successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations Dr. Yazdani!
- August 8, 2022: Adam successfully defended his PhD! Congratulations Dr. Conkey!
- July 18, 2022: Paper Accepted to RA-L “Attracting Conductive Nonmagnetic Objects with Rotating Magnetic Dipole Fields”; Devin K Dalton, Griffin F Tabor, Tucker Hermans, Jake J Abbott.
- June 30, 2022: 2 Papers Accepted to IROS 2022:
- “DULA and DEBA: Differentiable Ergonomic Risk Models for Postural Assessment and Optimization in Ergonomically Intelligent pHRI”; Amir Yazdani, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Andrew Merryweather, Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf
- “A Pseudo-Tractor Beam for Conductive, Nonmagnetic Objects using Magnetic Fields”; Devin K Dalton, Griffin F Tabor, Tucker Hermans, Jake J Abbott.
- April 12, 2022: 2 Papers Accepted to RSS 2022:
- “Adaptive Manipulation of Conductive, Non-magnetic Objects via a Continuous Model of Magnetically Induced Force and Torque”; Griffin F Tabor, Lan N Pham, Jake J Abbott, Tucker Hermans.
- “Correcting Robot Plans with Natural Language Feedback”; Pratyusha Sharma, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Valts Blukis, Chris Paxton, Tucker Hermans, Antonio Torralba, Jacob Andreas, Dieter Fox. website
- February 18, 2022: Paper accepted to RA-L (Special Issue on Robotic Handling of Deformable Objects) “DefGraspSim: Physics-based Simulation of Grasp Outcomes for 3D Deformable Objects”; Isabella Huang, Yashraj Narang, Clemens Eppner, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Miles Macklin, Ruzena Bajcsy, Tucker Hermans, and Dieter Fox.
- January 31, 2022: 2 Papers Accepted to ICRA 2022:
- “Learning Visual Shape Control of Novel 3D Deformable Objects from Partial-View Point Clouds”; Bao Thach, Brian Y. Cho, Alan Kuntz, and Tucker Hermans. arXiv/pdf
- “StructFormer: Learning Spatial Structure for Language-Guided Semantic Rearrangement of Novel Objects”; Weiyu Liu, Chris Paxton, Tucker Hermans, Dieter Fox. arXiv/pdf
- November 11, 2021: Paper Accepted to Journal of Biomechanical Engineering: “In Vitro Simulation of Shoulder Motion Driven by 3D Scapular and Humeral Kinematics”; Hema J Sulkar, Tyler W. Knighton, Linda Amoafo, Klevis Aliaj, Christopher W. Kolz, Yue Zhang, Tucker Hermans, Heath B. Henninger;
- October 20, 2021: Paper Published in Nature: “Dexterous magnetic manipulation of conductive non-magnetic objects”; Lan N. Pham, Griffin F. Tabor, Ashkan Pourkand, Jacob L. B. Aman, Tucker Hermans & Jake J. Abbott.
- October 6, 2021: Roya received the Outstanding Graduate Researcher of the Year award from the Mechanical Engineering department!
- September 13, 2021: 2 Papers Accepted to CoRL 2021
- September 8, 2021: Paper Accepted to AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI) 2021, “Ergonomically Intelligent Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Postural Estimation, Assessment, and Optimization”; Amir Yazdani, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Andrew Merryweather, Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf
- August 5, 2021: Emma Pinegar is a UROP scholar for Fall 2021. Congrats Emma!
- July 30, 2021: 2 Papers Acceptted to 2021 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR):
- “Toward Learning Context-Dependent Tasks from Demonstration for Tendon-Driven Surgical Robots”; Yixuan Huang, Michael Bentley, Tucker Hermans, Alan Kuntz.
- “Planning Sensing Sequences for Subsurface 3D Tumor Mapping”; Brian Y. Cho, Tucker Hermans, Alan Kuntz.
- July 9, 2021: Short Paper Accepted to RSS 2021 workshop Robotics for People (R4P): Perspectives on Interaction, Learning and Safety, “DULA: A Differentiable Ergonomics Model for Postural Optimization in pHRI”; Amir Yazdani, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Andrew Merryweather, Tucker Hermans.
- July 1, 2021: 2 Short Papers Accepted to RSS 2021 Workshop on Deformable Object Simulation in Robotics (DO-Sim)
- “DeformerNet: A Deep Learning Approach to 3D Deformable Object Manipulation”; Bao Thach, Alan Kuntz, & Tucker Hermans.
- “DefGraspSim: Simulation-base grasping of 3D deformable objects”; Isabella Huang, Yashraj Narang, Clemens Eppner, Balakumar Sundaralingam, Miles Macklin, Tucker Hermans, & Dieter Fox.
- June 1, 2021: Paper Accepted to IEEE CASE 2021: “Is The Leader Robot an Adequate Sensor for Posture Estimation and Ergonomic Assessment of A Human Teleoperator?”; Amir Yazdani, Roya Sabbagh Novin, Andrew Merryweather, Tucker Hermans. arxiv/pdf
- May 27, 2021: We've posted Bala's ICRA Talk on In-Hand Dynamics Estimation
- April 20, 2021: Tucker received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in the School of Computing effective July 1, 2021!
- April 1, 2021: Amir will be General Chair of HRI Pioneers 2022!
- February 28, 2021: Paper Accepted to ICRA 2021: “Risk-Aware Decision Making for Service Robots to Minimize Risk of Patient Falls in Hospitals”; Roya Sabbagh Novin, Amir Yazdani, Andrew Merryweather, Tucker Hermans. arXiv/pdf
- February 16, 2021: Tucker received a 2021 Sloan Fellowship. College of Engineering Article
home.txt · Last modified: 2025/04/24 19:05 by tucker