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Associate Professor
Alberto Rodriguez
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Class of 1957 Career Development Professor
Interests
- Autonomous Robotic Manipulation
- Dexterous Manipulation and Grasping
- End-effector Design
Professor Rodriguez News + Media
Using AI to Play Jenga
Using machine-learning and sensory hardware, Alberto Rodriguez, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and members of MIT's MCube lab, have developed a robot that is learning how to play the game Jenga®. The technology could be used in robots for manufacturing assembly lines.
Pushy robots learn the fundamentals of object manipulation
Using a novel dataset that captures how pushed objects move, Associate Professor Alberto Rodriguez is training robots to “learn” pushing dynamics that are fundamental to many complex object-manipulation tasks.
Giving robots a faster grasp
Associate Professor Alberto Rodriguez has found a way to significantly speed up the planning process required for a robot to adjust its grasp on an object by pushing that object against a stationary surface.
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.
- Dexterous Manipulation and Grasping.
- End-effector design.
- Automation.
Bio
Alberto is the Class of 1957 Associate Professor at the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, and leads the Manipulation and Mechanisms Lab at MIT (MCube) researching autonomous dexterous manipulation, and robot automation. Alberto graduated in Mathematics ('05) and Telecommunication Engineering ('06) from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and earned his PhD (’13) from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Alberto has received Best Paper Awards at conferences RSS’11, ICRA’13, RSS’18, IROS'18, RSS'19, and ICRA'21, and the 2018 Best Manipulation System Paper Award from Amazon, and the 2020 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award. He has been finalist for best paper awards at IROS’16, IROS'18, ICRA'20, RSS'20, and ICRA'21. He has led Team MIT-Princeton in the Amazon Robotics Challenge between 2015 and 2017, and has received Faculty Research Awards from Amazon in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and from Google in 2020. He is also the recipient of the 2020 IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation.
Honors + Awards
- 2021, MathWorks Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship
- 2021, IEEE Best Conference Paper Award ICRA 2021
"Extrinsic Contact Sensing with Relative-Motion Tracking from Distributed Tactile Measurements" - 2021, IEEE Finalist Best Paper Award in Service Robotics ICRA 2021
"Tactile SLAM: Real-time inference of shape and pose from planar pushing" - 2020, IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award
"TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physics" - 2020, IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation
"For contributions to dexterous robot manipulation" - 2020, Finalist Best Paper Award at RSS 2020
"Cable Manipulation with a Tactile-Reactive Gripper" - 2020, Finalist Best Manipulation Paper Award ICRA 2020
"Tactile Dexterity: Manipulation Primitives with Tactile Feedback" - 2020, Class of 1957 Career Development Professor
"This professorship recognizes innovative and imaginative teaching" - 2020, Amazon Faculty Research Award.
- 2020, Google Faculty Research Award.
- 2019, Best Systems Paper Award RSS 2019
"TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physics" - 2019, Amazon Faculty Research Award.
- 2018, Best Cognitive Paper Award at IROS 2018
"Augmenting Physical Simulators with Stochastic Neural Networks: Case Study of Planar Pushing and Bouncing" - 2018, Finalist Best Cognitive Paper Award at IROS 2018
"Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-Supervised Deep Reinfrcement Learning" - 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, Finalist Amazon Robotics Best Technical Paper Award
"GelSlim: A High-Resolution, Compact, Robust, and Calibrted Tactile-Sening Finger" - 2018, Best Student Paper Award at RSS 2018
"In-hand Manipulation via Motion Cones" - 2018, Amazon Faculty Research Award.
- 2017, Amazon Robotics Challenge - Stow Task, 1st place.
- 2016, Walter Henry Gale (1929) Career Development Professor
- 2016, Finalist Best Paper Award IROS 2016
"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 2013
"Effector Form Design for 1DOF Planar Actuation" - 2011, Best Student Paper Award at RSS 2011
"From Caging to Grasping"
Professional Service
- 2021-present, member of CESAR: IEEE Committee to Explore Synergies in Automation and Robotics
- 2021-present, RSS Sponsorhip chair
- 2020, Co-created "Robotics Today", an open series of technical talks in robotics.
- 2020-19, RSS Area chair for manipulation.
MIT Service
- 2021, MIT, Re-imagining Public Safety at MIT Working Group.
- 2021, MIT, MechE, General Faculty Search committee.
- 2020, MIT, MechE, Committee Strategic Integration of Data Science in Mechanical Engineering.
- 2020, MIT Team 2020, evaluating MIT’s options for the Fall semester.
- 2018-present, Lead MIT Robotics Seminar
- 2016-present, Associate Head of House, Sidney-Pacific, MIT
- 2013-present, MechE Graduate Admissions Committee
- 2016-17, Controls and Dynamics Curriculum Revision Committee, MechE, MIT
Teaching
- 2.003 Dynamics and Controls I
- 2.12 Introduction to Robotics
Patents
- 2021 May, (pending) "Tactile Dexterity and Control", US20210146532-A1, WO2021097166-A1
- 2020 Feb, (pending) "Robotic Manipulation of Objects using External Contacts", US20200055152-A1, WO2020041120-A1
- 2020 Feb, (pending) "Robotic Manipulation of Objects for Grip Adjustment", US20200055680-A1, WO2020041117-A1
- 2020 Feb, (pending) "Shape-Shifting Fingers for Robotic Grippers", US20200055197-A1, WO2020041116
- 2017 Nov, (issued) "Two-Phase Gripper to Reorient and Grasp", US9808936-B2
- 2014 Oct, (issued) "Method and Apparatus for Using Post Assembly Process Interaction Signatures to Detect Assembly Failures", WO2014160760-A3, CN105229548-A