Radu Corcodel

Radu Corcodel
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  • Biography

    Radu's PhD focused on workspace analysis and motion synthesis for arbitrary kinematic chains, with particular emphasis on robotic 3D printing and Fusion Deposition Modeling. Between 2007-2011, Radu worked for Siemens VDO (currently Continental, AG) as a Design Architect, where he contributed to the development and production of high-power DC/DC inverters for hybrid vehicles and digital tachographs for commercial vehicles. Currently his research focuses on motion planning and workspace analysis for over-actuated kinematic linkages and collaborative robots.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL Researchers at NeurIPS 2025 presented 2 conference papers, 5 workshop papers, and organized a workshop.
      Date: December 2, 2025 - December 7, 2025
      Where: San Diego
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Anoop Cherian; Radu Corcodel; Stefano Di Cairano; Chiori Hori; Christopher R. Laughman; Suhas Anand Lohit; Pedro Miraldo; Saviz Mowlavi; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Arvind Raghunathan; Diego Romeres; Yuki Shirai; Abraham P. Vinod; Pu (Perry) Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Control, Data Analytics, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Multi-Physical Modeling, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL researchers presented 2 main-conference papers and 5 workshop papers, as well as organized a workshop, at NeurIPS 2025.

        Main Conference Papers:

        1) Sorachi Kato, Ryoma Yataka, Pu Wang, Pedro Miraldo, Takuya Fujihashi, and Petros Boufounos, "RAPTR: Radar-based 3D Pose Estimation using Transformer", Code available at: https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-pose-transformer

        2) Runyu Zhang, Arvind Raghunathan, Jeff Shamma, and Na Li, "Constrained Optimization From a Control Perspective via Feedback Linearization"

        Workshop Papers:

        1) Yuyou Zhang, Radu Corcodel, Chiori Hori, Anoop Cherian, and Ding Zhao, "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", NeuriIPS 2025 Workshop on SPACE in Vision, Language, and Embodied AI (SpaVLE) (Best Paper Runner-up)

        2) Xiaoyu Xie, Saviz Mowlavi, and Mouhacine Benosman, "Smooth and Sparse Latent Dynamics in Operator Learning with Jerk Regularization", Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS)

        3) Spencer Hutchinson, Abraham Vinod, François Germain, Stefano Di Cairano, Christopher Laughman, and Ankush Chakrabarty, "Quantile-SMPC for Grid-Interactive Buildings with Multivariate Temporal Fusion Transformers", Workshop on UrbanAI: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities (UrbanAI)

        4) Yuki Shirai, Kei Ota, Devesh Jha, and Diego Romeres, "Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Pivoting via Optimization-Guided RL with Vision and Touch", Worskhop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making

        5) Mark Van der Merwe and Devesh Jha, "In-Context Policy Iteration for Dynamic Manipulation", Workshop on Embodied World Models for Decision Making

        Workshop Organized:

        MERL members co-organized the Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (MAR) Workshop (https://marworkshop.github.io/neurips25/). Organizers: Anoop Cherian (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Kuan-Chuan Peng (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Suhas Lohit (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Honglu Zhou (Salesforce AI Research), Kevin Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Joshua B. Tenenbaum (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
    •  
    •  EVENT    MERL Contributes to ICASSP 2025
      Date: Sunday, April 6, 2025 - Friday, April 11, 2025
      Location: Hyderabad, India
      MERL Contacts: Wael H. Ali; Petros T. Boufounos; Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Yanting Ma; Hassan Mansour; Yoshiki Masuyama; Joshua Rapp; Diego Romeres; Anthony Vetro; Pu (Perry) Wang; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Communications, Computational Sensing, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Machine Learning, Robotics, Signal Processing, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL has made numerous contributions to both the organization and technical program of ICASSP 2025, which is being held in Hyderabad, India from April 6-11, 2025.

        Sponsorship

        MERL is proud to be a Silver Patron of the conference and will participate in the student job fair on Thursday, April 10. Please join this session to learn more about employment opportunities at MERL, including openings for research scientists, post-docs, and interns.

        MERL is pleased to be the sponsor of two IEEE Awards that will be presented at the conference. We congratulate Prof. Björn Erik Ottersten, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing, and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan, the recipient of the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. Both awards will be presented in-person at ICASSP by Anthony Vetro, MERL President & CEO.

        Technical Program

        MERL is presenting 15 papers in the main conference on a wide range of topics including source separation, sound event detection, sound anomaly detection, speaker diarization, music generation, robot action generation from video, indoor airflow imaging, WiFi sensing, Doppler single-photon Lidar, optical coherence tomography, and radar imaging. Another paper on spatial audio will be presented at the Generative Data Augmentation for Real-World Signal Processing Applications (GenDA) Satellite Workshop.

        MERL Researchers Petros Boufounos and Hassan Mansour will present a Tutorial on “Computational Methods in Radar Imaging” in the afternoon of Monday, April 7.

        Petros Boufounos will also be giving an industry talk on Thursday April 10 at 12pm, on “A Physics-Informed Approach to Sensing".

        About ICASSP

        ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on the research advances and latest technological development in signal and information processing. The event has been attracting more than 4000 participants each year.
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  • Awards

    •  AWARD    Honorable Mention Award at NeurIPS 23 Instruction Workshop
      Date: December 15, 2023
      Awarded to: Lingfeng Sun, Devesh K. Jha, Chiori Hori, Siddharth Jain, Radu Corcodel, Xinghao Zhu, Masayoshi Tomizuka and Diego Romeres
      MERL Contacts: Radu Corcodel; Chiori Hori; Siddarth Jain; Diego Romeres
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics
      Brief
      • MERL Researchers received an "Honorable Mention award" at the Workshop on Instruction Tuning and Instruction Following at the NeurIPS 2023 conference in New Orleans. The workshop was on the topic of instruction tuning and Instruction following for Large Language Models (LLMs). MERL researchers presented their work on interactive planning using LLMs for partially observable robotic tasks during the oral presentation session at the workshop.
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  • Internships with Radu

    See All Internships at MERL

  • MERL Publications

    •  Hori, C., Masuyama, Y., Jain, S., Corcodel, R., Jha, D.K., Romeres, D., Le Roux, J., "Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM", IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), December 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-167 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hori2025dec,
      • author = {Hori, Chiori and Masuyama, Yoshiki and Jain, Siddarth and Corcodel, Radu and Jha, Devesh K. and Romeres, Diego and {Le Roux}, Jonathan},
      • title = {{Robot Confirmation Generation and Action Planning Using Long-context Q-Former Integrated with Multimodal LLM}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-167}
      • }
    •  Zhang, Y., Corcodel, R., Hori, C., Cherian, A., Zhao, D., "AxisBench: What Can Go Wrong in VLMs’ Spatial Reasoning?", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop, December 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-168 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Zhang2025dec2,
      • author = {{{Zhang, Yuyou and Corcodel, Radu and Hori, Chiori and Cherian, Anoop and Zhao, Ding}}},
      • title = {{{AxisBench: What Can Go Wrong in VLMs’ Spatial Reasoning?}}},
      • booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = dec,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-168}
      • }
    •  Zhang, Y., Corcodel, R., "Bipedalism for Quadrupedal Robots: Versatile Loco-Manipulation through Risk-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning", IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, DOI: 10.1109/​Humanoids65713.2025.11203112, September 2025.
      BibTeX TR2025-140 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Zhang2025sep2,
      • author = {Zhang, Yuyou and Corcodel, Radu},
      • title = {{Bipedalism for Quadrupedal Robots: Versatile Loco-Manipulation through Risk-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = sep,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • doi = {10.1109/Humanoids65713.2025.11203112},
      • isbn = {979-8-3315-9869-3},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2025-140}
      • }
    •  Zhang, Y., Corcodel, R., Hori, C., Cherian, A., Zhao, D., "SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs", arXiv, September 2025.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Zhang2025sep3,
      • author = {Zhang, Yuyou and Corcodel, Radu and Hori, Chiori and Cherian, Anoop and Zhao, Ding},
      • title = {{SpinBench: Perspective and Rotation as a Lens on Spatial Reasoning in VLMs}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2025,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25390}
      • }
    •  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}
      • }
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  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "System and Method for Controlling a Robot using Constrained Dynamic Movement Primitives"
      Inventors: Jha, Devesh; Shaw, Seiji; Raghunathan, Arvind U.; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Romeres, Diego; Nikovski, Daniel N.
      Patent No.: 12,343,876
      Issue Date: Jul 1, 2025
    • Title: "Simulation-in-the-loop Tuning of Robot Parameters for System Modeling and Control"
      Inventors: Jain, Siddarth; Van Baar, Jeroen; Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Sullivan, Alan; Benosman, Mouhacine
      Patent No.: 11,975,451
      Issue Date: May 7, 2024
    • Title: "Interactive Tactile Perception Method for Classification and Recognition of Object Instances"
      Inventors: Corcodel, Radu Ioan; Jain, Siddarth; van Baar, Jeroen
      Patent No.: 11,794,350
      Issue Date: Oct 24, 2023
    • Title: "Apparatus and Method for Planning Contact-Interaction Trajectories"
      Inventors: Onol, Aykut; Corcodel, Radu Ioan
      Patent No.: 11,548,150
      Issue Date: Jan 10, 2023
    • Title: "Detection, Tracking and 3D Modeling of Objects with Sparse RGB-D SLAM and Interactive Perception"
      Inventors: Marcal de Almeida, Diogo Rodrigues; Corcodel, Radu Ioan
      Patent No.: 10,977,480
      Issue Date: Apr 13, 2021
    • Title: "System for Training Descriptor with Active Sample Selection"
      Inventors: Kocanaogullari, Aziz; Cansizoglu, Esra; Corcodel, Radu Ioan
      Patent No.: 10,810,468
      Issue Date: Oct 20, 2020
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