Richard Li

I am a PhD researcher at MIT CSAIL, where I work on robotics and machine learning.

Email

Research

My research interest lies in finding a scalable path to robotics foundation models. I believe this will require solving cross-embodiment learning—especially transferring knowledge from human videos —as well as developing reinforcement learning methods that scale to large, real-world robotics datasets.

What Matters When Cotraining Robot Manipulation Policies on Everyday Human Videos?
Richard Li, Aditya Prakash, Andrew Wen, Branden Romero, Saurabh Gupta, Yilun Du, Pulkit Agrawal
In submission
project page

A recipe for cotraining robot manipulation policies on Internet human videos, achieving +29.7% success rate improvement across 6 tasks.

Stable Object Reorientation using Contact Plane Registration
Richard Li, Carlos Esteves, Ameesh Makadia, Pulkit Agrawal
ICRA 2022
project page  /  video  /  code

Predicting contact points with a CVAE and plane segmentation improves object generalization and handles multimodality.

Towards Practical Multi-object Manipulation using Relational Reinforcement Learning
Richard Li, Allan Jabri, Trevor Darrell, Pulkit Agrawal
ICRA 2020, ICML 2020: Bridge Between Perception and Reasoning Workshop

project page  /  video  /  code

Multi-object, long-horizon manipulation can be autonomously learned using a curriculum and graph neural network architecture.

Projects
Contact-Aware Lyapunov Controller Design via Alternating Optimization
Richard Li, Timur Garipov
2022
paper  /  video

Synthesizing Lyapunov controllers through contact with alternating optimization.

Vision-Based Proprioceptive Sensing for Soft Robotic Fingers
Richard Li, Annan Zhang
2021
paper

Vision-based fingertip pose estimation with internal camera and CNN pose estimator.

Template.