Latest News

We are excited to announce ManipulationNet, a community-driven global infrastructure, that enables benchmarking robot manipulation research at scale with any robot at anytime and anywhere. Inspired by the prior efforts in benchmarking robot manipulation, including standard object sets paired with evaluation protocols, simulation-based benchmarking platforms, and onsite competitions in conferences, the ManipulationNet, for the first time, has simultaneously provided authenticity, accessibility, and realism in one online large-scale benchmarking system.

Our paper “Object-Centric Kinodynamic Planning for Nonprehensile Robot Rearrangement Manipulation” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).

Our paper “Collision-Inclusive Manipulation Planning for Occluded Object Grasping via Compliant Robot Motions” has been accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

We have 5 papers accepted to the 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)! Our contributions cover the topics of robot interactive perception, autonomous markerless calibration, combined pick-motion-and-place planning, active surface-based end-effector design, and self-identification for in-hand manipulation.

We are proud to announce that our esteemed lab member, Ben Leebron, has been awarded the prestigious “Distinction in Research and Creative Works” by Rice University. This is a university honor for graduating students that will be granted at Commencement and will appear on recipients’ transcripts and diplomas.

Our paper “Caging in Time: A Framework for Robust Object Manipulation under Uncertainties and Limited Robot Perception” has been accepted by International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR).

Our paper “Robust Peg-in-Hole Assembly under Uncertainties via Compliant and Interactive Contact-Rich Manipulation” has been accepted by Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025.

Dr. Kaiyu Hang has been selected by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) to receive the award of ASME Rising Star of Mechanical Engineering in recognition of his contributions to robotic manipulation.

We are excited to announce that our lab member, Hayden Webb, has placed 3rd place in the prestigious “Student Mechanism and Robotics Design Competition” at the 2024 ASME IDETC.

Our paper “Interactive Robot-Environment Self-Calibration via Compliant Exploratory Actions” has been accepted by IEEE/RSJ IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IEEE/RSJ IROS) 2024. Check out the video!