NEWS MERL contributes to ICRA 2025

Date released: June 6, 2025

NEWS MERL contributes to ICRA 2025
Date:

May 19, 2025 - May 23, 2025
Where:

IEEE ICRA
Description:

MERL made significant contributions to both the organization and the technical program of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, from May 19th to May 23rd.

MERL was a Bronze sponsor of the conference, and MERL researchers chaired four sessions in the areas of Manipulation Planning, Human-Robot Collaboration, Diffusion Policy, and Learning for Robot Control.

MERL researchers presented four papers in the main conference on the topics of contact-implicit trajectory optimization, proactive robotic assistance in human-robot collaboration, diffusion policy with human preferences, and dynamic and model learning of robotic manipulators. In addition, five more papers were presented in the workshops: “Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots,” “Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities,” “Long-term Human Motion Prediction,” and “The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From Innovation to Implementation.”

MERL researcher Diego Romeres delivered an invited talk titled “Dexterous Robotics: From Multimodal Sensing to Real-World Physical Interactions.”

MERL also collaborated with the University of Padua on one of the conference’s challenges: the “3rd AI Olympics with RealAIGym” (https://ai-olympics.dfki-bremen.de).

During the conference, MERL researchers received the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best New Application Paper Award for their paper titled “Smart Actuation for End-Edge Industrial Control Systems.”

About ICRA

The IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on research advances and the latest technological developments in robotics. The event attracts over 7,000 participants, 143 partners and exhibitors, and receives more than 4,000 paper submissions.
External Link:

https://2025.ieee-icra.org
MERL Contacts:
Research Areas:

Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Human-Computer Interaction
- Related Publications
  Lu, K., Ma, C., Hori, C., Romeres, D., "KitchenVLA: Iterative Vision-Language Corrections for Robotic Execution of Human Tasks", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics (SafeLVMs@ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-068 PDF
  @inproceedings{Lu2025may,
  author = {Lu, Kai and Ma, Chenyang and Hori, Chiori and Romeres, Diego},
  title = {{KitchenVLA: Iterative Vision-Language Corrections for Robotic Execution of Human Tasks}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshop on Safely Leveraging Vision-Language Foundation Models in Robotics (SafeLVMs@ICRA)},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-068}
  }
  De Lazzari, D., Terreran, M., Giacomuzzo, G., Jain, S., Falco, P., Carli, R., Romeres, D., "Human Monitoring with Correlation-based Dynamic Time Warping for Collaborative Assembly", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation, May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-067 PDF Video
  @inproceedings{DeLazzari2025may2,
  author = {De Lazzari, Davide and Terreran, Matteo and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Jain, Siddarth and Falco, Pietro and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
  title = {{Human Monitoring with Correlation-based Dynamic Time Warping for Collaborative Assembly}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-067}
  }
  Giacomuzzo, G., Pegoraro, G., Terreran, M., Ghidoni, S., Carli, R., Romeres, D., "E-UHTP: An Extended Human-Aware Task Planner for Communication-Free Collaborative Assembly", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation, May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-066 PDF
  @inproceedings{Giacomuzzo2025may,
  author = {Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Pegoraro, Giulia and Terreran, Matteo and Ghidoni, Stefano and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
  title = {{E-UHTP: An Extended Human-Aware Task Planner for Communication-Free Collaborative Assembly}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - Workshop on The Future of Intelligent Manufacturing: From innovation to implementation},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-066}
  }
  Giammarino, V., Queeney, J., Paschalidis, I.C., "Visually Robust Adversarial Imitation Learning from Videos with Contrastive Learning", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-065 PDF
  @inproceedings{Giammarino2025may,
  author = {Giammarino, Vittorio and Queeney, James and Paschalidis, Ioannis Ch.},
  title = {{Visually Robust Adversarial Imitation Learning from Videos with Contrastive Learning}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-065}
  }
  De Lazzari, D., Terreran, M., Giacomuzzo, G., Jain, S., Falco, P., Carli, R., Romeres, D., "PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-064 PDF Video
  @inproceedings{DeLazzari2025may,
  author = {De Lazzari, Davide and Terreran, Matteo and Giacomuzzo, Giulio and Jain, Siddarth and Falco, Pietro and Carli, Ruggero and Romeres, Diego},
  title = {{PACE: Proactive Assistance in Human-Robot Collaboration through Action-Completion Estimation}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-064}
  }
  Zhou, Z., Di Cairano, S., Wang, Y., Berntorp, K., "Simultaneous Collision Detection and Force Estimation for Dynamic Quadrupedal Locomotion", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-063 PDF
  @inproceedings{Zhou2025may,
  author = {Zhou, Ziyi and {Di Cairano}, Stefano and Wang, Yebin and Berntorp, Karl},
  title = {{Simultaneous Collision Detection and Force Estimation for Dynamic Quadrupedal Locomotion}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-063}
  }
  Bronars, A., Corcodel, R., Jha, D.K., "High-Accuracy Tactile Pose Estimation for Connector Assembly", ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”, May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-057 PDF
  @inproceedings{Bronars2025may,
  author = {Bronars, Antonia and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K.},
  title = {{High-Accuracy Tactile Pose Estimation for Connector Assembly}},
  booktitle = {ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-057}
  }
  Chen, Y., Jha, D.K., Tomizuka, M., Romeres, D., "FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-053 PDF Video
  @inproceedings{Chen2025may,
  author = {Chen, Yuxin and Jha, Devesh K. and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Romeres, Diego},
  title = {{FDPP: Fine-tune Diffusion Policy with Human Preference}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-053}
  }
  Shirai, Y., Raghunathan, A., Jha, D.K., "Hierarchical Contact-Rich Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Modal Manipulation using Tight Convex Relaxations", IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2025.
  BibTeX TR2025-052 PDF
  @inproceedings{Shirai2025may,
  author = {Shirai, Yuki and Raghunathan, Arvind and Jha, Devesh K.},
  title = {{Hierarchical Contact-Rich Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Modal Manipulation using Tight Convex Relaxations}},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = 2025,
  month = may,
  url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-052}
  }