close menu
Assistant Professor
Alberto Rodriguez
Walter Henry Gale (1929) Career Development Professor
Interests
- Autonomous robotic manipulation
- Hand dexterity
- End-effector Design
Faculty Details
Education
-
2013
CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
Ph.D Robotics -
2006
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Degree in Telecommunications Engineering -
2005
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Degree in Mathematics
Research Interests
- Autonomous robotic manipulation.
- Hand dexterity.
- End-effector design.
- Automation.
Bio
Alberto Rodriguez is the Walter Henry Gale (1929) Career Development Professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT. Alberto graduated in Mathematics ('05) and Telecommunication Engineering ('06) from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona, and earned his PhD in Robotics (’13) from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He spent a year in the Locomotion group at MIT, and joined the faculty at MIT in 2014, where he leads the Manipulation and Mechanisms Lab (MCube). Alberto is the recipient of the Best Student Paper Awards at conferences RSS 2011 and ICRA 2013 and Best Paper finalist at IROS 2016. He has lead Team MIT-Princeton in the Amazon Robotics Challenge between 2015 and 2017, and is recipient of the Amazon Research Award. His main research interests are in autonomous robotic manipulation, mechanical design, and automation.
Honors + Awards
- 2018, Best Cognitive Paper Award at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
"Augmenting Physical Simulators with Stochastic Neural Networks: Case Study of Planar Pushing and Bouncing" - 2018, Amazon Robotics Best Systems Paper Award
"Robotic pick-and-place of novel objects in clutter with multi-affordance grasping and cross-domain image matching" - 2018, Best Student Paper Award at RSS
"In-hand Manipulation via Motion Cones" - 2018, Amazon Research Award.
- 2017, Amazon Robotics Challenge - Stow Task, 1st place.
- 2016, Walter Henry Gale (1929) Career Development Professor
- 2016, Best Paper Award finalist at IROS
"More than a Million Ways to Be Pushed. A high-Fidelity Experimental Dataset of Planar Pushing" - 2016, Amazon Picking Challenge 2016, 3rd and 4th place
- 2015, Amazon Picking Challenge 2015, 2nd place
- 2014, Finalist for Best Video Award
"Regrasping Objects with Extrinsic Dexterity" - 2013, Best Student Paper Award at ICRA
"Effector Form Design for 1DOF Planar Actuation" - 2011, Best Student Paper Award at RSS
"From Caging to Grasping"
MIT Service
- 2016-present, Associate Head of House, Sidney-Pacific, MIT.
- 2016-17, Controls and Dynamics Curriculum Revision Committee, MechE, MIT.
- 2013-present, MechE Graduate Admissions Committee
Teaching
- 2.003 Dynamics and Controls I
- 2.12 Introduction to Robotics
Patents
- 2017 Feb, “Two-Phase Gripper to Reorient and Grasp”, US20170036354 A1
- 2014 Nov, “Method and Apparatus for Using Post Assembly Process Interaction Signatures to Detect Assembly Failures”, WO2014160760 A3, CN105229548 A