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
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.