The MCube Lab

2024/08/16 Graduate student Rachel Holladay defended her PhD thesis "Leveraging Mechanics for Multi-step Robotic Manipulation Planning". Congratulations Rachel!
2024/08/09 Graduate student Anthony Simeonov defended his PhD thesis "Geometric Learning for Manipulating Scenes and Objects". Congratulations Anthony!
2024/04/12 Graduate student Sangwoon Kim defended his PhD thesis "TEXterity: Tactile Extrinsic deXterity". Congratulations Sangwoon!
2023/08/31 Prof. Alberto Rodriguez steps down from his faculty position at MIT to lead robotic manipulation research at Boston Dynamics. Alberto will remain as Visiting Scientist at MIT working with students at MCube.
2023/06/16 Graduate student Yen-Chen Lin defended his thesis "Neural Fields for Robotic Manipulation". Congratulations Yen-Chen!
2023/05/08 Graduate student Orion Taylor defended his thesis "Manipulation of Unknown Objects via Contact Configuration Regulation". Congratulations Orion!
2022/12/15 Graduate student Bernardo Aceituno defended his thesis "An Optimization Approach to Certified Manipulation". Congratulations Bernardo!
2022/08/05 Graduate student Maria Bauza defended her thesis "Visuo-Tactile Perception for Dexterous Manipulation". Congratulations Maria!
2022/07/18 Student Rachel Holladay is awarded the "2022 Seth J. Teller Award for Excellence, Inclusion and Diversity" from the EECS Department.
2022/05/26 Paper "Manipulation of unknown objects via contact configuration regulation" by N. Doshi, O. Taylor, and A. Rodriguez is awarded the 2022 IEEE ICRA Outstanding Manipulation Paper Award.
2022/04/25 ICRA Paper "Neural Descriptor Fields: SE(3)-Equivariant Object Representations for Manipulation" by A. Simeonov*, Y. Du*, A. Tagliasacchi, J. Tenenbaum, A. Rodriguez, P. Agrawal**, and V. Sitzmann** is profiled by MIT News.
2022/03/29 Prof. Alberto Rodriguez is profiled by MIT News about the new Science Hub.
2021/06/02 Paper "Extrinsic Contact Sensing with Relative-Motion Tracking from Distributed Tactile Measurements" by D. Ma, S. Dong and A. Rodriguez is awarded the 2021 IEEE ICRA Best Conference Paper Award.
2021/06/02 Paper "Tactile SLAM: Real-time inference of shape and pose from planar pushing" by S. Suresh, M. Bauza, KT. Yu, JG. Mangelson, A. Rodriguez and M. Kaess is a finalist for the 2021 IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award in Service Robotics.
2021/05/01 Prof. Alberto Rodriguez is promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure.
2021/04/16 Paper "TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physics" by A. Zeng, S. Song, J. Lee, A. Rodriguez and T. Funkhouser is awarded the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award.
2020/12/09 Graduate student Siyuan Dong defended his thesis "High-resolution Tactile Sensing for Reactive Robotic Manipulation". Congratulations Siyuan!
2020/07/16 Paper "Cable Manipulation with a Tactile-Reactive Gripper" by Y. She, S. Wang, S. Dong, N. Sunil, A. Rodriguez and E. Adelson is finalist to Best Paper Award at RSS 2020. This work is part of collaboration between the MCube lab and the Perceptual Science Group at MIT
2020/07/13 RSS Paper "Cable Manipulation with a Tactile-Reactive Gripper" by Y. She, S. Wang, S. Dong, N. Sunil, A. Rodriguez and E. Adelson is profiled by MIT News.
2020/06/5 Paper "Tactile Dexterity: Manipulation Primitives with Tactile Feedback" by F. Hogan, J. Ballester, S. Dong and A. Rodriguez is finalist to Best Manipulation Paper Award at ICRA 2020
2020/07/1 Alberto Rodriguez is awarded the Class of 1957 Career Development Professorship "for innovative and imaginative teaching".
2020/06/11 PhD student Bernardo Aceituno-Cabezas is awarded the 2020-2021 MathWorks Engineering Fellowship for academic year 2020-2021. Congratulations Bernardo!
2020/06/05 Alberto Rodriguez is awarded the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation "for contributions to dexterous robot manipulation".
2020/04/16 Alberto Rodriguez gave a talk on "The Role of Tactile Sensing in Automated Part Picking, Handling, and Assembly" for the MIT ILP (Industrial Liason Program).
2020/02/12 Professor Rodriguez receives the 2020 Google Faculty Research Award from Google "String Manipulation: Learning and Planning with Affordances and Predictive Models".
2020/01/01 Professor Rodriguez receives the 2020 Amazon Faculty Research Award from Amazon Robotics "Generalizable Object Manipulation".
2019/12/09 Graduate student Francois Hogan defended his thesis "Reactive Manipulation with Contact Models and Tactile Feedback". Congratulations Francois!
2019/12/2 Graduate student Nikhil Chavan-Dafle defended his thesis "Dexterous Manipulation with Simple Grippers". Congratulations Nikhil!
2019/11/01 Post-doc Neel Doshi is a recipient of the intelligence community postdoctoral fellowship.
2019/10/21 IROS Paper "Omnipush: accurate, diverse, real-world dataset of pushing dynamics with RGBD images" by M. Bauza, F. Alet, Y. Lin, T. Lozano-Perez, L. Kaelbling, P. Isola and A. Rodriguez is profiled by MIT News.
2019/10/17 IJRR Paper "Planar In-Hand Manipulation via Motion Cones" by N. Chavan-Dafle, R. Holladay and A. Rodriguez is profiled by MIT News and Tech Crunch.
2019/09/26 The Jenga Project is profiled in in an episode of "Coded World" in Channel NewsAsia, a documentary by Peddling Pictures.
2019/08/23 Graduate student Nima Fazeli defended his thesis "Inference and Learning for Rigid-Body Models of Manipulation.
2019/06/26 Paper "Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physics" by A. Zeng, S. Song, J. Lee, A. Rodriguez and T. Funkhouser wins the Best Systems Paper Award at RSS 2019.
2019/02/16 Graduate Student Maria Bauza is the recipient of a Facebook Emerging Scholar Award.
2019/02/02 Professor Rodriguez is promoted to Associate Professor without Tenure.
2019/01/31 Paper "See, feel, act: Hierarchical learning for complex manipulation skills with multisensory fusion" by N. Fazeli, M. Oller, J. Wu, Z. Wu, J. Tenenbaum and A. Rodriguez is featured in Wired, Tech Crunch, MIT News and MIT Tech Review, among others.
2019/01/01 Professor Rodriguez receives the 2019 Amazon Faculty Research Award from Amazon Robotics "Object Search and Grasp in Dense Clutter".
2018/10/05 Paper "Augmenting Physical Simulators with Stochastic Neural Networks: Case Study of Planar Pushing and Bouncing" by A. Ajay, J. Wu, N. Fazeli, M. Bauza, L. Kaelbling, J. Tenebaum and A. Rodriguez wins the IROS Best Cognitive Paper Award.
2018/10/05 Paper "Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learning" by A. Zeng, S. Song, S. Welker, J. Lee, A. Rodriguez and T. Funkhouser is a Finalist for the IROS Best Cognitive Paper Award.
2018/09/14 Paper "Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching" by A. Zeng, S. Song, K.T. Yu et al wins the Amazon Robotics Best Systems Paper Award in Manipulation.
2018/09/14 Paper "GelSim: A High-Resolution, Comptact, Robust and Calibrated Tactile-Sensing Finger" by E. Donlon, S. Dong, M. Liu, J. Li, E. Adelson and A. Rodriguez is a Finalist for the Amazon Robotics Best Technical Paper Award in Manipulation.
2018/08/15 Graduate student Bernardo Aceituno and visiting student Jose Ballester join the MCube Lab.
2018/06/28 Paper "In-Hand Manipulation via Motion Cones" by N. Chavan-Dafle, R. Holladay and A. Rodriguez wins Best Student Paper Award at RSS 2018.
2018/06/15 Graduate student Peter Yu defended his thesis "Realtime State Estimation for Contact Manipulation".
2018/06/13 Graduate student Maria Bauza is profiled by MIT News.
2018/02/20 Team MIT-Princetons's pick-and-place robotic system from the 2017 Amazon Robotics challenge is featured by MIT News.
2018/01/08 Professor Rodriguez receives the 2018 Amazon Faculty Research Award from Amazon Robotics "Reactive Grasping with Tactile Reflexes".
2018/01/01 MCube starts a collaboration with HKUST, Delta, and Lenovo on "Prehensile Dexterity for Autonomous Robotic Manipulation" through the MIT-HongKong Alliance.
2018/01/01 MCube starts a collaboration on "The Robotic Manipulation Data Engine" with the Toyota Research Institute.
2017/11/01 Paper "Optimal Shape and Motion Planning for Dynamic Planar Manipulation" by Orion Taylor and Alberto Rodriguez at RSS 2017 invited to an special issue at Autonomous Robots journal.
2017/08/01 Team MIT's finish in the 2017 Amazon Robotics challenge is featured by EPR Retail News.
2017/07/31 Team MIT's finish in the 2017 Amazon Robotics challenge is featured by Amazon.
2017/07/30 Team MIT-Princeton is featured in Nikkan Kogyo News.
2017/07/30 Team MIT-Princeton finishes 1st in the Stowing task of the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge and 5th in the final.
2017/07/28 Team MIT-Princeton is featured in an article on the 2017 Amazon Robotics challenge written by Machine Design.
2017/07/26 Professor Rodriguez comments on the 2017 Amazon Robotics challenge in an article by WIRED.
2017/07/17 Student Nikhil Chavan-Dafle, pattent approved [US20170036354 A1] "Two-Phase Gripper to Reorient and Grasp".
2017/06/23 A video of a demo at the MCube lab is featured on IEEE Spectrum.
2017/06/01 Graduate student Rachel Holladay joins the MCube Lab. Rachel was awarded the MIT-EECS and NSF Fellowships.
2017/03/03 Nikhil Chavan-Dafle's work on Prehensile pushing featured at TechCrunch
2016/10/13 Paper "More than a Million Ways to Be Pushed: A High-Fidelity Experimental Dataset of Planar Pushing" by KT. Yu, M. Bauza, N. Fazeli, and A. Rodriguez, is Best Paper Award Finalist at IROS 2016
2016/07/15 NRI grant award in collaboration with Matthew Mason and Byron Boots, [IIS-1637753] "Accelerating Robotic Manipulation with Data-Enhanced Contact Mechanics".
2016/07/02 Team MIT-Princeton finishes 3rd and 4th at the 2016 Amazon Picking Challenge
2016/07/01 Professor Rodriguez is awarded the Walter Henry Gale (1929) Career Development Professorship at MIT.
2015/08/13 Nikhil Chavan-Dafle's work on extrinsic dexterity is featured in Robohub.
2015/05/30 Professor Rodriguez comments on the 2015 Amazon Robotics Challenge in an article by the Seattle Times.
2015/08/05 Nikhil Chavan-Dafle's work on extrinsic dexterity is featured in Gizmodo
2015/05/27 Team MIT finishes 2nd at the 2015 Amazon Picking Challenge.