
Perception and Manipulation
March. 2022: Our paper titled Sim-to-Real Transfer of Visual Grounding for Human-Aided Ambiguity Resolution got accepted to Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs 2022)! Congrats Georgios! |
March. 2022: Our paper titled Lifelong 3D Object Recognition and Grasp Synthesis using Dual Memory Recurrent Self-Organization Networks got accepted to Neural Networks Journal! Congrats Krishna! |
Jan. 2022: Hamidreza Kasaei is serving as associate editor for the IEEE/RSJ IROS 2022! . |
Oct. 2021: Our paper titled Local-HDP: Interactive open-ended 3D object category recognition in real-time robotic scenarios got accepted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS)! Congrats Hamed! |
Sep. 2021: Hamidreza Kasaei is serving as associate editor for the IEEE/RSJ ICRA 2022! . |
July 2021: We will organize a full-day workshop on 4th Robot Learning Workshop: Self-Supervised and Lifelong Learning at NeruIPS2021. |
July. 2021: Our paper titled The State of Lifelong Learning in Service Robots: Current Bottlenecks in Object Perception and Manipulation got accepted to Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems |
May. 2021: Our paper titled MORE: Simultaneous Multi-View 3D Object Recognition and Pose Estimation got accepted to 30th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO_MAN 2021)! Congrats Tommaso! |
June. 2021: Hamidreza Kasaei gave an invited talk at the University of Groningen on Towards lifelong robot-learning in human-centric environments: How robots can adapt to new environments incrementally? |
May. 2021: Our paper titled Open-Ended Fine-Grained 3D Object Categorization by Combining Shape and Texture Features in Multiple Colorspaces got accepted to IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids2020)! Congrats Nils! |
April. 2021: We are looking for a motivated Ph.D. student to work on "Dual-arm manipulation tasks". Detailed information about how to apply is available here! |
April. 2021: Our paper titled 3D_DEN: Open-ended 3D Object Recognition Using Dynamically Expandable Networks got accepted to IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems! Congrats Sudhakaran! |
March. 2021: Our paper titled Self-Imitation Learning by Planning got accepted to ICRA2021! Congrats Sha! |
Feb. 2021: Hamidreza Kasaei is serving as associate editor for the IEEE/RSJ IROS 2021! |
Feb. 2021: Hamidreza Kasaei gave an invited talk at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI) on Robots Beyond the Factory: Open-ended Robot Learning in Human-Centric Environments! |
Jan. 2021: Our paper titled Investigating the Importance of Shape Features, Color Constancy, Color Spaces and Similarity Measures in Open-Ended 3D Object Recognition got accepted to Intelligent Service Robotics Journal! |
Nov. 2020: Our paper titled OrthographicNet: A Deep Transfer Learning Approach for 3D Object Recognition in Open-Ended Domains got accepted to IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics! (IF 5.71). |
October 2020: Hamidreza Kasaei is serving as associate editor for the IEEE/RSJ ICRA 2021! . |
June 2020: Our paper titled Learning to Grasp 3D Objects using Deep Residual U-Nets got accepted to IEEE RO-MAN 2020! Congrats Yikun!. |
March 2020: Our paper titled Accelerating Reinforcement Learning for Reaching using Continuous Curriculum Learning got accepted to IJCNN 2020! Congrats Sha! |
October 2019: Hamidreza Kasaei is serving as associate editor for the IEEE/RSJ ICRA 2020! . |
June 2019: Our paper Local-LDA: Open-Ended Learning of Latent Topics for 3D Object Recognition got accepted at IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI - IF = 17.730). |
June 2019: Our paper Look Further to Recognize Better: Learning Shared Topics and Category-Specific Dictionaries for Open-Ended 3D Object Recognition got accepted at IROS 2019. |
May 2019: We will organize a full-day workshop on Task-Informed Grasping (TIG-II): From Perception to Physical Interaction at RSS2019. |
April 2019: We will organize a full-day workshop on Open-Ended Learning for Object Perception and Grasping: Current Successes and Future Challenges at IROS 2019. |
April 2019: Hamidreza Kasaei got selected to be a member of the 2019 cohort of the RSS Pioneers. |
January 2019: Our paper Interactive Open-Ended Object, Affordance and Grasp Learning for Robotic Manipulation got accepted at ICRA 2019. |
October 2018: Our NVIDIA GPU Grant has been approved. Thank NVIDIA Corporation for supporting our works. |
In our group, we focus on Lifelong Interactive Robot Learning to make robots capable of learning in an open-ended fashion by interacting with non-expert human users. In particular, we have been developing this goal over the following six specific research directions. Details of our publications, including paper, demonstration, and code, can be found here!
We are interested in attaining a 3D understanding of the world around us. In particular, the perception system provides important information that the robot has to use for interacting with users and environments.
A service robot must be able to interact with the environment as well as human users. We are interested in fundamental research in object-agnostic grasping, affordance detection, task-informed grasping, and object manipulation.
No matter how extensive the training data used for batch learning, a robot will always face new objects. Therefore, the robot should be able to continually learn about new tasks from few training examples on-site by interacting with non-expert users.
We are interested in attaining fully reactive manipulation functionalities in a closed-loop manner. Reactive systems have to continuously check if they are at risk of colliding while planners should check every configuration that the robot may attempt to use.
A service robot may sense the world through different modalities that may provide visual, haptic or auditory cues about the environment. In this vein, we are interested in exploiting multimodality for learning better representations to improve robot's performance.
A dual-arm robot has very good manipulability and maneuverability which is necessary to accomplish a set of everyday tasks (dishwashing, hammering). We are interested in efficient imitation learning, collabrative manipulation, and large object manipulation.
We are actively looking for students to work on several amazing projects that involve:
If you are interested in doing your PhD/Master/Bachelor thesis in one of the mentioned Research Directions, please send us an e-mail including the following information:
The motivation letter should state (½ - 1 page):
We will try to get back to you within a week. The primary qualification is interest in doing research, and if you have that, we encourage you to apply even if you have limited experience with AI. We strive to be a diverse and inclusive group that is open to students from all backgrounds.
Good self-funded PhD, Master, and intern will be considered on a case by case basis. If you are interested in doing your PhD at Interactive Robot Learning Lab and you have funded from your Government (e.g., China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship), we can consider your application. Please contact hamidreza.kasaei@rug.nl
Dr. Hamidreza Kasaei
Artificial Intelligence Department,
University of Groningen,
Bernoulliborg building,
Nijenborgh 9 9747 AG Groningen,
The Netherlands.
Office: 340
Tel: +31-50-363-33926
E-mail: hamidreza.kasaei@rug.nl