https://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/ Very sparse news list for MIT's Robot Locomotion Group Friday, 8 Aug 2025 Congratulations to Boyuan Chen for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBM9sIGRgqA Tuesday, 19 Nov 2024 Congratulations to Lirui Wang for successfully defending his PhD thesis! Thursday, 24 Oct 2024 Congratulations to Terry Suh for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://youtu.be/0MMqNta0038 Monday, 22 Apr 2024 Congratulations to Tobia Marcucci for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSbpfAVF_7c Tuesday, 19 Sep 2023 Check out our work at TRI on Diffusion Policy (towards Large Behavior Models) and the corresponding <a href="https://medium.com/toyotaresearch/tris-robots-learn-new-skills-in-an-afternoon-here-s-how-2c30b1a8c573">blog post</a> <p> <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/w-CGSQAO5-Q?si=sQYzAGdpxK3qhFgC" width="620"></iframe></p> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-CGSQAO5-Q Wednesday, 14 June 2023 Congratulations to Terry Suh, Max Simchowitz, and Kaiqing Zhang who's paper titled "Do differentiable simulators give better policy gradients?" was recognized with the "Best Paper (of the year) Award" from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Model-based Optimization for Robotics. https://www.tcoptrob.org/news/2023-06-14-best-paper/ Friday, 20 Jan 2023 Congratulations to Tao Pang for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kdxMKwXwaE Friday, 15 July 2022 Congratulations to Terry Suh, Max Simchowitz, and Kaiqing Zhang who's paper titled "Do differentiable simulators give better policy gradients?" was recognized with the "Outstanding Paper Award" at ICML 2022. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Suh22b.pdf Thursday, 07 January 2022 Congratulations to Alexandre Amice, Hongkai Dai, Pete Werner, and Annan Zhang who's paper titled "Finding and Optimizing Certified, Collision-Free Regions in Configuration Space for Robot Manipulators" was recognized with the "Outstanding Paper Award" at WAFR 2022. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Amice22.pdf Friday, 17 June 2022 Congratulations to Yunzhu Li for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eof6F4-r0k Friday, 17 June 2022 Congratulations to Greg Izatt for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb7klk2Z2rE Saturday, 15 August 2020 For better or worse, most research talks these days are now online. I've posted a handful of links to new talks, including Russ on Lex Fridman's AI Podcast, and at the IFRR Colloquium on the Roles of Physics-Based Models and Data-Driven Learning in Robotics. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/talks.html Monday, 20 July 2020 Congratulations to Lucas Manuelli for successfully defending his PhD thesis! https://youtu.be/Gb-t2hIpYpk Friday, 29 May 2020 Congratulations to Shen Shen for successfully defending her thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLhF0Cfoq4Y Wednesday, 18 Sep 2019 Congratulations to Twan Koolen for successfully defending his thesis! https://replay.csail.mit.edu/recordings/1350 Monday, 19 Aug 2019 Congratulations to Pete Florence for successfully defending his thesis! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zca2u9cOQyg&feature=youtu.be Thursday, 27 Jun 2019 Checkout some of the work being done by TRI's manipulation team <p> <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LgaFkWCtSGU?si=ONpuqHMEFKkRo8uq" width="620"></iframe></p> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgaFkWCtSGU Monday, 15 Oct 2018 Congratulations to Robin Deits for successfully defending his thesis! https://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/elib/inchit.cgi?bibtag=Deits18a&url=../public_papers/Deits18a.pdf Wednesday, 1 Oct 2018 Congratulations to Pete Florence and Lucas Manuelli whose paper <b>Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation</b> won the Conference Best Paper Award at CoRL 2018! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XteGx-iLHR4&feature=youtu.be&t=30823 Wednesday, 19 Sept 2018 Congratulations to Pete Florence and Lucas Manuelli whose paper <b>Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation</b> won the first ever <i>Amazon Robotics Best Technical Paper Award (2018)</i>. https://www.amazonrobotics.com/site/binaries/content/assets/amazonrobotics/pdfs/ar-best-paper-announcement.pdf Monday, 18 June 2018 Congratulations to Ani Majumdar whose paper <b>Funnel libraries for real-time robust feedback motion planning</b> won the first ever <i>International Journal of Robotics Research</i> Paper of the Year (2017). http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0278364917712421 Thursday, 26 April 2018 Congratulations to Katy Muhlrad for winning the "Audience Choice Award" at the SuperUROP Showcase for her work on "Using GelSight to Identify Objects by Touch". Wednesday, 26 July 2017 Frank Permenter successfully defended his thesis, titled "Reduction methods in semidefinite and conic optimization". Congratulations Frank! Friday, 13 May 2017 Pete Florence was awarded the EECS Masterworks award. Congratulations Pete! Friday, 13 May 2017 Sarah Hensley was awarded the 2017 Best SuperUROP Presentation award. Congratulations Sarah! Tuesday, 10 May 2017 Michael Posa successfully defended his thesis, titled "Optimization for Control and Planning of Multi-Contact Dynamic Motion". Congratulations Michael! https://replay.csail.mit.edu/recordings/597 Monday, 09 May 2017 Our paper describing the planning and control that we implemented on Atlas for the DARPA Robotics Challenge was recognized with the IEEE-RAS Technical Commmittee on Whole-Body Control 2016 Best Paper of the Year award. http://wholebodycontrol.eu/awards.html Saturday, 28 Jan 2017 Amara Mesnik put together a great mini-documentary on MIT's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. <p> <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6JqvIRMQU1E" width="620"></iframe></p> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JqvIRMQU1E Friday, 13 May 2016 Ani Majumdar has successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congratulations Ani! Click on the link to watch his talk, and check the publications page to read his thesis. https://youtu.be/BgK4iTv5bjw Wednesday, 24 Feb 2016 NOVA's documentary on the DARPA Robotics Challenge, titled "Rise of the Robots" is online now. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/rise-of-the-robots.html Monday, 07 Dec 2015 Andy Barry has successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congratulations Andy! Click on the link to watch his talk. https://youtu.be/PsKKfmb6Uwg Wednesday, 18 Nov 2015 NASA's R5 humanoid robot is coming to MIT. We're very excited to have the opportunity to do research on this amazing platform. <center style="margin-top:10px"><img width=300 src="http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/valkyrie-robot-nasa-1447878572776.jpg" > </center> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/nasa-awards-r5-valkyrie-robots-to-mit-and-northeastern Thursday, 05 Nov 2015 Our DRC Team's continuous walking with stereo fusion paper just won the Best Paper Award (Oral) at Humanoids 2015. Congratulations all! Thursday, 03 Nov 2015 Andy's video of high-speed UAV obstacle avoidance (using only onboard processing) got some great coverage this week. <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/mit-drone-avoids-obstacles">This article by the IEEE Spectrum was particularly nice and insightful. </a> </br>. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_qah8oIzCwk" width="560"></iframe></p> <p> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/mit-drone-avoids-obstacles Monday, 26 Oct 2015 Andres Valenzuela just successfully defended his PhD thesis. Congratulations Andres! Friday, 29 May 2015 We're heading off to the DARPA Robotics Challenge. We've been posting some fun videos to our YouTube site (linked here). Wish us luck! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KknQpzIflU&list=PL8JQmirEoE-bSwXJqPe3O-0HbRGqqUxYL Tuesday, 26 May 2015 Benoit Landry has submitted his Masters Thesis on Aggressive Quadrotor Flight in Dense Clutter. Be sure to check out his cool video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-s564NoAu0 Thursday, 22 May 2015 Scott Kuindersma has accepted a tenure-track position at Harvard starting this fall. Congratulations Scott! Thursday, 20 Nov 2014 Robin Deits' paper on Mixed-integer optimization for footstep planning just won the Best Paper Award (Oral) at Humanoids 2014. Congratulations Robin! Tues, 19 Aug 2014 Benoit Landry has been awarded the 2014 Siebel Scholarship. Congratulations Benoit! Wed, 17 Jun 2014 Ram Vasudevan has officially accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Congratulations Ram! Go Blue! Mon, 16 Jun 2014 Joe Moore has officially accepted a position at the Johns Hopkins Applied Phsyics Lab. Congratulations Joe! Tue, 27 May 2014 Joseph Moore officially defended his PhD. You can watch his defense on the group talks page. Congratulations Joe! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2VNluQ58FI Sat, 21 Dec 2013 Team MIT advances to the next round in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. <p> <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/b6UzI7MyqvU" width="620"></iframe></p> <p> <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/jeAboVErowE" width="620"></iframe></p> http://drc.mit.edu/ Wed, 02 Oct 2013 Michael Posa has been awarded the 2013 Rolf Locher Graduate Fellowship. Congratulations Michael! Sat, 14 Sept 2013 The Robot Locomotion Group hosted the evening session of the 2014 Boston Barefoot Running Festival. http://www.bostonbarefootrunningfestival.com Wed, 11 Sept 2013 Tough robo-challenge casts robots as rescuers. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929344.400-tough-robochallenge-casts-robots-as-rescuers.html Thu, 27 Jun 2013 Team MIT Completes First Hurdle in DARPA Robotics Challenge. http://www.csail.mit.edu/node/2047 Thu, 09 May 2013 08:00:00 EST Ani Majumdar and Amir Ali Ahmadi's paper on nonlinear control design along trajectories just won the Best Paper Award at ICRA 2013. Congratulations! Wed, 10 April 2013 21:00:00 EST Mike Posa and Mark Tobenkin's paper on SOS Verification of Rigid Bodies through Contact won the Best Paper Award at the 16th International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control. Congratulations! Mon, 20 Aug 2012 Ani Majumdar has been awarded the 2012 Siebel Scholarship. Congratulations Ani! Wed, 25 Jul 2012 08:00:00 EST New Aircraft Capable of Fast, Accurate and Repeatable Flight. http://www.csail.mit.edu/node/1778 Sun, 20 May 2012 18:00:00 EST Russ is the recipient of the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching. Fri, 18 May 2012 16:30:00 EST John Roberts has successfully defended his thesis on Control of Fluid-Body Systems via Real-Time PIV. Congraulations John! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/talks.html Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:00:00 EST Our work on flapping flight and perching was featured in the article "A flapping of wings" in this week's issue of Science Magazine. Photo by Jason Dorfman. <p> <center> <img height=225 src="images/ornithopter_05_web.jpg"> </center> <p> http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6075/1430.short Thu, 30 May 2011 17:00:00 PDT Jacob Steinhardt's RSS 2011 paper on stochastic verification was a finalist for the conference Best Student Paper Award. Congratulations Jacob. Wed, 25 May 2011 12:00:00 EST We are co-organizing a workshop at RSS 2011 on "integrated planning and control". As a part of the workshop, we will give a short tutorial on LQR-Trees and Sums-of-Squares Verification for Feedback Motion Planning, which will include tutorial software. http://sites.google.com/site/ipcatrss2011/ Thu, 12 May 2011 12:00:00 EST Jacob Steinhardt has been awarded the 2011 Robert M. Fano UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) award for his outstanding work as an undergraduate researcher. Congratulations Jacob! Thu, 12 May 2011 12:00:00 EST Hongkai Dai has been awarded the 2011 Frederick C. Hebbie Teaching Award for his outstandng performance as the TA for 6.832 this spring. Congratulations Hongkai! Tue, 05 April 2011 12:00:00 EST Andy Barry has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations Andy! Mon, 04 April 2011 12:00:00 EST CSAIL has posted a short news item about our MURI project. http://www.csail.mit.edu/node/1459 Sun, 13 February 2011 12:00:00 EST Russ has accepted a courtesy appointment with the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro Sat, 4 December 2010 09:00:00 EST We have posted example code for SOS verification of finite-time invariance (e.g. "funnels") along trajectories. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/software.html Sun, 22 November 2010 18:00:00 EST A random collection of images from our group lab space appeared in the Sunday edition of the New York Times (Business Day). http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/11/20/business/20101121_BACKDROP.html Thu, 6 August 2010 00:14:00 EST Lecture videos from the 2010 Dynamic Walking meeting are now available. http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/locomotion:1216 Tue, 20 July 2010 12:30:00 EST Rick Cory was named the 2010 Boeing Engineering Student of the Year. Congratulations Rick!! You can watch Boeing's video <a href=http://www.boeing.com/farnborough2010/html/esoya_072210.html?sms_ss=email >here</a>. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/cory-award.html Tue, 20 July 2010 02:00:00 EST Our work on perching was spotlighted on the MIT homepage. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/perching-plane-0720.html Fri, 16 July 2010 12:00:00 EST A team with members from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, New York University, Harvard University, and Wageningen was selected for funding on an ONR MURI for UAVs flying through dense forest and urban environments. http://www.defense.gov/news/d20100716MURI.pdf Thu, 08 July 2010 08:00:00 EST http://dynamicwalking.org/ The dynamic walking meeting was held at MIT. Videos of most of the presentations will be available in the next few days. Wed, 30 June 2010 10:30:00 EST Russ gives the Early Career Spotlight Talk at RSS 2010. http://www.roboticsconference.org/spotlight1.html Wed, 12 May 2010 13:00:00 EST Rick Cory successfully defended his thesis entitled Supermaneuverable Perching Robots. Congratulations Rick! The video is available on the Group Talks page. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/talks.html Tue, 04 May 2010 12:00:00 EST The IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning wins the 2010 Most Active Technical Committee Award http://www.learning-robots.de/ Sat, 01 May 2010 13:00:00 EST Rick Cory led a hands-on demonstration with robotic birds at the Cambridge Science Festival. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/csf.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST Elena Glassman has successfully submitted her Master's Thesis. Congratulations Elena! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Glassman10a.pdf Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST The Robot Locomotion Group is now on <a href=http://www.facebook.com/pages/MIT-Robot-Locomotio/n-Group/230213325842>facebook</a> and <a href=http://twitter.com/robotlocomotion>twitter</a>. Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST Alec Shkolnik successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations Alec! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Shkolnik10b.pdf Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EST http://www.darpa.mil/Docs/YFA09AnnouncementFinal.pdf Russ Tedrake was awarded the 2009 DARPA Young Faculty Award. Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EST Katie Byl has accepted an Assistant Professor position at UC Santa Barbara. Congratulations Katie! Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EST http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Tedrake09a.pdf The LQR-Trees paper won the Best Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems, 2009. A MATLAB software distribution for the LQR-Trees algorithm is coming soon. Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:00:00 EST http://dynamicwalking.org/ The Dynamic Walking meeting will be held a MIT in 2010, from July 8-11, organized by Russ Tedrake and Hugh Herr. Fri, 8 May 2009 12:00:00 EST Congratulations to Elena Glassman for winning the EECS Masterworks Oral Thesis Presentation Award. Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:00:00 EST Congratulations to Woody Hoburg and Elena Glassman for winning the NSF Graduate Fellowship. Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:00:00 EST Fumiya Iida has accepted a SNF Assistant Professorship at ETH Zurich. Congratulations Fumiya! Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:00:00 EST Congratulations to John Roberts for passing the qualifiers and submitting his Masters thesis!. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/pubs.html Wed, 01 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EST The Robot Locomotion Group has moved to the third floor. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/directions.html Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EST The full-day workshop at IROS 2008 was a great success. PDFs of many of the talks and all of the poster abstracts are available on the meeting website. We plan to organize another Robot Learning workshop in 2009. http://www-clmc.usc.edu/~jrpeters/tcrl/pmwiki.php/TC/IROS2008 Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EST Katie Byl successfully defended her thesis. Congratulations Katie! http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/pubs.html Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EST Russ Tedrake, Sebastian Seung, Alex Megretski, and Hongkun Park have been awarded an NSF EFRI for investigating the dynamics of neural networks on a planar patch-clamp array. You can find NSF's press release here. http://www.nsf.gov/eng/efri/fy08awards.jsp Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EST The Phoenix (a 2m wingspan ornithopter) has taken it's first autonomous flight. Photos by Jason Dorfman. <center> <img height=225 src="images/ornithopter_01_web.jpg">    <img height=225 src="images/ornithopter_08_web.jpg"> </center> Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EST Katie Byl was awarded the IFRR Student Fellowship for her paper/presentation at ISER 2008 Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EST The MIT Learning Locomotion (LittleDog) Team was awarded phase III funding. Photo by Jason Dorfman. <center> <img height=250 src="images/littledog_36_web.jpg"> </center> Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EST Russ Tedrake was awarded an NSF Career Award Wed, 28 May 2008 12:00:00 EST Elena Glassman was awarded an NDSEG Graduate Fellowship Sun, 25 May 2008 12:00:00 EST The new IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning is now online. http://www.learning-robots.de/ Sun, 18 May 2008 12:00:00 EST Russ Tedrake was awarded the Jerome Saltzer award for undergraduate teaching Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EST Rick Cory wins the MIT Computer Science Masters Thesis Award Thu, 08 May 2008 12:00:00 EST Rick Cory wins the Masterworks Award for his poster on perching planes and robotic ornithopters Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EST Russ Tedrake was awarded the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship