News & Events

83 News items, Awards, Events or Talks found.


  •  NEWS    Rien Quirynen Appointed IPC Vice-Chair for the 8th IFAC Conference on NMPC 2024
    Date: August 27, 2024 - August 30, 2024
    Where: Kyoto, Japan
    Research Areas: Control, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researcher Rien Quirynen has been appointed as Vice-Chair from Industry of the International Program Committee of the 8th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control, which will be held in Kyoto, Japan, in August 2024.

      IFAC NMPC is the main symposium focused on model predictive control, theory, methods and applications, includes contributions on control, optimization, and machine learning research, and is held every 3 years.
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  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2023] Prof. Stefanie Tellex presents talk titled Towards Complex Language in Partially Observed Environments
    Date & Time: Tuesday, February 14, 2023; 12:00 PM
    Speaker: Stefanie Tellex, Brown University
    MERL Host: Daniel N. Nikovski
    Research Area: Robotics
    Abstract
    • Robots can act as a force multiplier for people, whether a robot assisting an astronaut with a repair on the International Space station, a UAV taking flight over our cities, or an autonomous vehicle driving through our streets. Existing approaches use action-based representations that do not capture the goal-based meaning of a language expression and do not generalize to partially observed environments. The aim of my research program is to create autonomous robots that can understand complex goal-based commands and execute those commands in partially observed, dynamic environments. I will describe demonstrations of object-search in a POMDP setting with information about object locations provided by language, and mapping between English and Linear Temporal Logic, enabling a robot to understand complex natural language commands in city-scale environments. These advances represent steps towards robots that interpret complex natural language commands in partially observed environments using a decision theoretic framework.
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  •  EVENT    MERL's Virtual Open House 2022
    Date & Time: Monday, December 12, 2022; 1:00pm-5:30pm ET
    Location: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)/Virtual
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video
    Brief
    • Join MERL's virtual open house on December 12th, 2022! Featuring a keynote, live sessions, research area booths, and opportunities to interact with our research team. Discover who we are and what we do, and learn about internship and employment opportunities.
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  •  NEWS    Rien Quirynen to give an invited talk at the University of California Santa Cruz
    Date: November 14, 2022
    Where: Zoom
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Rien Quirynen will give an invited talk at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California Santa Cruz on "Real-time Motion Planning and Predictive Control by Mixed-integer Programming for Autonomous Vehicles". The talk will present recent work on a tailored branch-and-bound method for real-time motion planning and decision making on embedded processing units, and recent results for two applications related to automated driving and traffic control.
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  •  NEWS    Invited talk at The Penn State Seminar Series on Systems, Control, and Robotics.
    Date: October 20, 2022
    Where: University Park, PA
    MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Robotics
    Brief
    • Devesh Jha, a Principal Research Scientist in the Data Analytics Group at MERL, delivered an invited talk at The Penn State Seminar Series on Systems, Control and Robotics. This talk presented some of the recent work done at MERL in the areas of optimization and control for robotic manipulation in unstructured environment.
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  •  NEWS    Stefano Di Cairano to give a public lecture on status and challenges of automotive driving at IEEE CSS Day
    Date: October 24, 2022
    Where: Online, 10/24/2022 9:00am (Eastern time)
    MERL Contact: Stefano Di Cairano
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Dr. Stefano Di Cairano (Senior Team Leader at MERL) has been invited to give a public talk at the first IEEE CSS Day event on the status, challenges, and role of control in autonomous driving.

      The talk, titled "The Long Voyage Towards Autonomous Driving, with Control Systems as the Co-Pilot", will review some history of autonomous driving, some of the open challenges that control technology may help address, and the next steps towards full-autonomy. The talk is designed for a non-technical audience, to explain the role and impact of control in automated driving technology.
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  •  NEWS    MERL launches Postdoctoral Research Fellow program
    Date: September 21, 2022
    MERL Contacts: Philip V. Orlik; Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) invites qualified postdoctoral candidates to apply for the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow. This position provides early career scientists the opportunity to work at a unique, academically-oriented industrial research laboratory. Successful candidates will be expected to define and pursue their own original research agenda, explore connections to established laboratory initiatives, and publish high impact articles in leading venues. Please refer to our web page for further details.
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  •  NEWS    Yebin Wang appointed as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2023.
    Date: September 15, 2022
    MERL Contact: Yebin Wang
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
    Brief
    • Yebin Wang, a Senior Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Electric Machines and Devices, is serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023.


      As the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, ICRA will bring together the world's top researchers and most important companies to share ideas and advances in our field.
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  •  AWARD    Marcus Greiff receives Outstanding Student Paper Award at CCTA 2022
    Date: August 25, 2022
    Awarded to: Marcus Greiff
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
    Brief
    • Marcus Greiff, a Visiting Research Scientist at MERL, was awarded one of three outstanding student paper awards at the IEEE CCTA 2022 conference for his paper titled "Quadrotor Control on SU(2)xR3 with SLAM Integration". The award was given for originality, clarity, and potential impact on practical applications of control. The work presents a complete UAV control system design, facilitating autonomous supermarket inventorying without the need for external motion capture systems. A video of the experiments is on YouTube, including both simulations and real-time examples.
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  •  NEWS    MERL work on 3D Printing in Orbit featured in IEEE Spectrum
    Date: June 3, 2022
    Where: IEEE Spectrum
    MERL Contacts: Avishai Weiss; William S. Yerazunis
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Communications, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL's research on on-orbit manufacturing was recently featured in an IEEE Spectrum article. The article, titled How Satellites Will 3D Print Their Own Antennas in Space gives an overview of MERL's efforts towards developing a system that construct spacecraft parts in their natural environment-- that is, in space. The technology, called OOM for On-Orbit Manufacturing, provides a way to manufacture not just antenna dishes, but general freeform sturctures on orbit and in a vacuum, using an solar-hardened resin based approach. This technology includes both a special high performance liquid resin, as well as a 3D freeform printer capable of building objects far larger than the as-launched satellite.

      An important aspect of the special resin is that all components have extremely low vapor pressures and do not boil away even in a vacuum. When exposed to solar ultraviolet, the resin hardens by polymerization crosslinking, forming a tough, rigid solid in a few seconds of exposure. No separate UV source is needed, making the entire process very energy efficient. Additionally, the crosslinking resin is heat resistant, and is unaffected to at least 400 degrees C. The 3D printer needed to print the resin is unlike common liquid-resin SLA printers- there is no vat of liquid resin, instead a shielded nozzle delivers the liquid resin directly to where the resin is needed. The result is the ability to construct large and very large structures, not just parabolic dishes, but also solar panel supports and structural trusswork, while in orbit. The system could even construct parts that were unanticipated during mission design and launch.

      MERL's On-Orbit Manufacturing Technology had previously been featured in a Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release and was recently on display at a recent press exhibition in Tokyo, Japan.

      IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. IEEE Spectrum has a circulation of over 400,000 engineers worldwide, making it one of the leading science and engineering magazines.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers presented 5 papers and an invited workshop talk at ICRA 2022
    Date: May 23, 2022 - May 27, 2022
    Where: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
    MERL Contacts: Ankush Chakrabarty; Stefano Di Cairano; Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Pedro Miraldo; Daniel N. Nikovski; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Abraham P. Vinod; Yebin Wang
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researchers presented 5 papers at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) that was held in Philadelphia from May 23-27, 2022. The papers covered a broad range of topics from manipulation, tactile sensing, planning and multi-agent control. The invited talk was presented in the "Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Work of the Future" which covered some of the work done by MERL researchers on collaborative robotic assembly. The workshop was co-organized by MERL, Mitsubishi Electric Automation's North America Development Center (NADC), and MIT.
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  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Prof. Michael Posa presents talk titled Hybrid robotics and implicit learning
    Date & Time: Tuesday, May 3, 2022; 1:00 PM
    Speaker: Michael Posa, University of Pennsylvania
    MERL Host: Devesh K. Jha
    Research Areas: Control, Optimization, Robotics
    Abstract
    • Machine learning has shown incredible promise in robotics, with some notable recent demonstrations in manipulation and sim2real transfer. These results, however, require either an accurate a priori model (for simulation) or a large amount of data. In contrast, my lab is focused on enabling robots to enter novel environments and then, with minimal time to gather information, accomplish complex tasks. In this talk, I will argue that the hybrid or contact-driven nature of real-world robotics, where a robot must safely and quickly interact with objects, drives this high data requirement. In particular, the inductive biases inherent in standard learning methods fundamentally clash with the non-differentiable physics of contact-rich robotics. Focusing on model learning, or system identification, I will show both empirical and theoretical results which demonstrate that contact stiffness leads to poor training and generalization, leading to some healthy skepticism of simulation experiments trained on artificially soft environments. Fortunately, implicit learning formulations, which embed convex optimization problems, can dramatically reshape the optimization landscape for these stiff problems. By carefully reasoning about the roles of stiffness and discontinuity, and integrating non-smooth structures, we demonstrate dramatically improved learning performance. Within this family of approaches, ContactNets accurately identifies the geometry and dynamics of a six-sided cube bouncing, sliding, and rolling across a surface from only a handful of sample trajectories. Similarly, a piecewise-affine hybrid system with thousands of modes can be identified purely from state transitions. Time permitting, I'll discuss how these learned models can be deployed for control via recent results in real-time, multi-contact MPC.
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  •  NEWS    Radu Corcodel to present invited seminar at NYU on Robot Vision
    Date: May 4, 2022
    MERL Contact: Radu Corcodel
    Research Areas: Computer Vision, Robotics
    Brief
    • Radu Corcodel, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Computer Vision Group, will present an overview of the Robot Perception research published by MERL for advanced manipulation. The talk will mainly cover topics pertaining to robotic manipulation in unstructured environments such as machine vision, tactile sensing and autonomous grasping. The seminar will also cover specific perception problems in non-prehensile interactions such as Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization and Tactile Classification, and is intended for a broader audience.
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  •  NEWS    Devesh Jha delivers invited talk at Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, NYU
    Date: March 1, 2022
    Where: Online/Zoom
    MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • Devesh Jha, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave an invited talk at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, NYU. The title of the talk was "Robotic Manipulation in the Wild: Planning, Learning and Control through Contacts". The talk presented some of the recent work done at MERL for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments in the presence of significant uncertainty.
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  •  NEWS    Radu Corcodel joins the IEEE-RAS Standing Committee for Standards & Human-Robot Interaction Terminology
    Date: February 3, 2022
    MERL Contact: Radu Corcodel
    Research Areas: Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
    Brief
    • Radu Corcodel, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's computer vision group, has been invited to join the IEEE-RAS Standing Committee for Standards & Human-Robot Interaction Terminology. This committee defines standard terms relevant to human-robot interaction in service, social, education, industrial, and research robotic applications. It establishes and defines a common terminology for practitioners and users of human-robot interaction (HRI) technologies. It is also intended to address issues common within the field of HRI, particularly surrounding the use of inconsistent and/or conflicting terms and definitions.

      The invitation is a recognition of Radu's excellent record of robotics research and a significant opportunity for him to contribute to new standards in robotics terminology.
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  •  EVENT    Prof. Melanie Zeilinger of ETH to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST
    Location: Virtual Event
    Speaker: Prof. Melanie Zeilinger, ETH
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
    Brief
    • MERL is excited to announce the second keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
      Prof. Melanie Zeilinger from ETH .

      Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Zeilinger's talk is scheduled for 3:15pm - 3:45pm (EST).

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021

      Keynote Title: Control Meets Learning - On Performance, Safety and User Interaction

      Abstract: With increasing sensing and communication capabilities, physical systems today are becoming one of the largest generators of data, making learning a central component of autonomous control systems. While this paradigm shift offers tremendous opportunities to address new levels of system complexity, variability and user interaction, it also raises fundamental questions of learning in a closed-loop dynamical control system. In this talk, I will present some of our recent results showing how even safety-critical systems can leverage the potential of data. I will first briefly present concepts for using learning for automatic controller design and for a new safety framework that can equip any learning-based controller with safety guarantees. The second part will then discuss how expert and user information can be utilized to optimize system performance, where I will particularly highlight an approach developed together with MERL for personalizing the motion planning in autonomous driving to the individual driving style of a passenger.
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  •  EVENT    Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan of Rice University to give keynote at MERL's Virtual Open House
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 1:00pm - 5:30pm EST
    Location: Virtual Event
    Speaker: Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan, Rice University
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
    Brief
    • MERL is excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our Virtual Open House 2021:
      Prof. Ashok Veeraraghavan from Rice University.

      Our virtual open house will take place on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities. Prof. Veeraraghavan's talk is scheduled for 1:15pm - 1:45pm (EST).

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021

      Keynote Title: Computational Imaging: Beyond the limits imposed by lenses.

      Abstract: The lens has long been a central element of cameras, since its early use in the mid-nineteenth century by Niepce, Talbot, and Daguerre. The role of the lens, from the Daguerrotype to modern digital cameras, is to refract light to achieve a one-to-one mapping between a point in the scene and a point on the sensor. This effect enables the sensor to compute a particular two-dimensional (2D) integral of the incident 4D light-field. We propose a radical departure from this practice and the many limitations it imposes. In the talk we focus on two inter-related research projects that attempt to go beyond lens-based imaging.

      First, we discuss our lab’s recent efforts to build flat, extremely thin imaging devices by replacing the lens in a conventional camera with an amplitude mask and computational reconstruction algorithms. These lensless cameras, called FlatCams can be less than a millimeter in thickness and enable applications where size, weight, thickness or cost are the driving factors. Second, we discuss high-resolution, long-distance imaging using Fourier Ptychography, where the need for a large aperture aberration corrected lens is replaced by a camera array and associated phase retrieval algorithms resulting again in order of magnitude reductions in size, weight and cost. Finally, I will spend a few minutes discussing how the wholistic computational imaging approach can be used to create ultra-high-resolution wavefront sensors.
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  •  EVENT    MERL Virtual Open House 2021
    Date & Time: Thursday, December 9, 2021; 100pm-5:30pm (EST)
    Location: Virtual Event
    Research Areas: Applied Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Electric Systems, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio, Digital Video, Human-Computer Interaction, Information Security
    Brief
    • Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories cordially invites you to join our Virtual Open House, on December 9, 2021, 1:00pm - 5:30pm (EST).

      The event will feature keynotes, live sessions, research area booths, and time for open interactions with our researchers. Join us to learn more about who we are, what we do, and discuss our internship and employment opportunities.

      Registration: https://mailchi.mp/merl/merlvoh2021
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  •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2021] Dr. Hsiao-Yu (Fish) Tung presents talk at MERL entitled Learning to See by Moving: Self-supervising 3D scene representations for perception, control, and visual reasoning
    Date & Time: Tuesday, November 2, 2021; 1:00 PM EST
    Speaker: Dr. Hsiao-Yu (Fish) Tung, MIT BCS
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Abstract
    • Current state-of-the-art CNNs can localize and name objects in internet photos, yet, they miss the basic knowledge that a two-year-old toddler has possessed: objects persist over time despite changes in the observer’s viewpoint or during cross-object occlusions; objects have 3D extent; solid objects do not pass through each other. In this talk, I will introduce neural architectures that learn to parse video streams of a static scene into world-centric 3D feature maps by disentangling camera motion from scene appearance. I will show the proposed architectures learn object permanence, can imagine RGB views from novel viewpoints in truly novel scenes, can conduct basic spatial reasoning and planning, can infer affordability in sentences, and can learn geometry-aware 3D concepts that allow pose-aware object recognition to happen with weak/sparse labels. Our experiments suggest that the proposed architectures are essential for the models to generalize across objects and locations, and it overcomes many limitations of 2D CNNs. I will show how we can use the proposed 3D representations to build machine perception and physical understanding more close to humans.
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  •  NEWS    Diego Romeres appointed as Associate Editor at ICRA 2022.
    Date: September 17, 2021 - October 31, 2021
    MERL Contact: Diego Romeres
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Diego Romeres, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022.
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  •  NEWS    Anthony Vetro delivers keynote on robotic manipulation at inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems
    Date: August 12, 2021
    MERL Contact: Anthony Vetro
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics
    Brief
    • Anthony Vetro gave a keynote at the inaugural IEEE Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), which was held virtually from August 11-13, 2021. The talk focused on challenges and recent progress in the area of robotic manipulation. The conference is sponsored by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) through the SPS Autonomous Systems Initiative.

      Abstract: Human-level manipulation continues to be beyond the capabilities of today’s robotic systems. Not only do current industrial robots require significant time to program a specific task, but they lack the flexibility to generalize to other tasks and be robust to changes in the environment. While collaborative robots help to reduce programming effort and improve the user interface, they still fall short on generalization and robustness. This talk will highlight recent advances in a number of key areas to improve the manipulation capabilities of autonomous robots, including methods to accurately model the dynamics of the robot and contact forces, sensors and signal processing algorithms to provide improved perception, optimization-based decision-making and control techniques, as well as new methods of interactivity to accelerate and enhance robot learning.
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  •  NEWS    MERL researchers Diego Romeres, Devesh Jha and Siddarth Jain co-organized a workshop on Robotic Manipulation at the RSS 2021 conference
    Date: July 13, 2021
    Where: Robotics: Science and Systems
    MERL Contacts: Siddarth Jain; Devesh K. Jha; Diego Romeres
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researchers Diego Romeres, Devesh Jha, and Siddarth Jain together with research groups at MIT, NVIDIA, NIST, TUM, Google DeepMind, ETH Zurich, Google AI, and UMASS Lowell organized a workshop at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2021 conference. The workshop was on "Advancing Artificial Intelligence and Manipulation for Robotics: Understanding Gaps, Industry and Academic Perspectives, and Community Building". The workshop had a list of excellent speakers both from academia and industry. Recording of the talks and of the panel discussion can be found in the link below.
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  •  NEWS    Karl Berntorp gave an invited lecture at University of Houston
    Date: April 22, 2021
    Where: Houston, Texas
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics, Signal Processing
    Brief
    • The invited seminar "System Design, Planning, and Control for Autonomous Driving" was part of the Distinguished Seminar series at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston, Houston, Tx. The invited lecture described MERL research related to the different system components involved in autonomous driving, with particular focus on motion-planning and predictive-control methods.
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  •  NEWS    Invited talk at University of Leeds
    Date: April 7, 2021
    Where: Online
    MERL Contact: Devesh K. Jha
    Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
    Brief
    • Devesh Jha, a Principal Research Scientist in MERL's Data Analytics group, gave an invited talk at the robotics seminar series at the University of Leeds. The talk presented some of the recent work done at MERL in the areas of robotic manipulation and robot learning.
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  •  NEWS    Karl Berntorp gave an invited lecture at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Linköping University
    Date: April 6, 2021
    Where: Linköping University, Sweden
    Research Areas: Control, Dynamical Systems, Robotics
    Brief
    • MERL researcher Karl Berntorp was invited to give a lecture in the ELLIIT PhD course "Motion Planning and Control" at the Division of Vehicular Systems, Department of Electrical Engineering, Linköping University. The course is open for Ph.D. students as well as senior undergraduate students, and covers both fundamental algorithms and state-of-the-art methods for motion planning and control. The invited lecture described MERL research on the use of invariant sets for safe motion planning and control, with application to autonomous vehicles.
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