GRASP Laboratory

Fun with Robots is BACK again!!! This year will be a 2 week educational program featuring Dr. Michelle Johnson's Rehabilitation Robotics Lab! We will be located at the Roxborough Library on April 9th and April 16th! Stay tuned for more! #GRASP #GRASPLab #FunwithRobots

Join us TOMORROW for the GRASP SFI seminar featuring Dr. Jay Patrikar who will be presenting “Exploiting Uncertainty for Fieldable Robot Autonomy” from 3PM-4PM. Fore more info: grasp.upenn.edu/events/spring-… #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPSFI #GRASPSeminar

Last week, the Benjamin Franklin Society gathered in New York City to celebrate the power of philanthropy and community at Penn. Through their generosity, BFS members are expanding opportunities for students and fueling growth in AI, data science and interdisciplinary learning, while supporting bold initiatives like Penn Engineering 2030. At the event, Robert Ghrist (@prof_g) reflected on the lasting impact of philanthropy at Penn: “Your belief today becomes someone else’s possibility tomorrow. It lives on in the innovators who will design safer infrastructure, develop life-saving medical devices, advance sustainable energy and shape technologies we cannot yet imagine.” #PennBFS #InspiringImpact #PennInspires #LOVEPenn #bfsny

VLA policies learn generalist robot behaviors from massive teleoperation datasets, hoping that the right behavior emerges. But they rarely use perception during training or inference: powerful foundation models of 3D geometry, semantics, or human motion are ignored. @TimSong52005757, @LongLeRobot, and our @GRASPlab team introduce Omniguide, based on a simple idea: Instead of retraining policies, let perception guide action at inference time. We express diverse guidance sources as attractive and repulsive energy fields in 3D space and inject their gradients into the generative process of VLA policies. This lets perception modules steer actions without retraining the policy: A modular path toward composable robot intelligence. Project: omniguide.github.io Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.10052

STARTING SOON Please welcome Dr. Nikolay Atanasov who will be presenting “Elements of Generalizable Robot Autonomy” from 10:30AM - 11:45AM TODAY!!! For More info: grasp.upenn.edu/events/spring-… #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPonRobotics #GRASPSeminar

This week's seminar was given by Hanyu Li, postdoc researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, on optimizing porous electrode design for ultra-fast charging in advanced batteries. Li was invited by @ParisPerdikaris, Associate Prof. Learn more: events.seas.upenn.edu/event/meam-sem…

We hope the students from Kingsway Regional HS FIRST Robotics Team had a wonderful time touring the GRASP Lab! A HUGE Thank You to our wonderful researchers taking time out of their schedules to showcase their recent work to the aspiring team! #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPTour

Join us TODAY for the GRASP SFI seminar featuring Dr. Ruta Desai who will be presenting “Towards AI Partners: Socially Intelligent Agents that Augment Human Abilities” from 3PM-4PM. For more info: grasp.upenn.edu/events/spring-… #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPSFI #GRASPSeminar

Join us TOMORROW in welcoming Dr. Daniel Lee who will be presenting “AI White Boxes and Neural Representation Geometry” from 10:30AM-11:45AM. For more info: grasp.upenn.edu/events/spring-… #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPonRobotics #GRASPSeminar

We hope the students from Marian Anderson NSBE junior chapter had a wonderful time touring the GRASP Lab! A BIG Thank You to the GRASP volunteers who took time out of their schedules to share their research to these aspiring students! #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPTour

As part of Engineering Week, the Engineering Deans' Advisory Board hosted a @Prof_G lookalike contest in honor of one of Penn Engineering's most recognizable faculty. #EngineeringWeek

Advances in contact-rich control have snuck under the radar in the last few years, but there's been major progress. Breaking from the same old workshop format, we have NO invited *talks* from the usual suspects, but instead are asking you to share your new ideas and hot takes.

Join us TODAY for the GRASP SFI seminar featuring Ph.D. candidate, Stone Tao @Stone_Tao , who will be presenting “Accelerating and Driving Robotics Progress with Simulation Integrated Robot Learning” from 3PM-4PM. More info: grasp.upenn.edu/events/spring-… #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPSFI

I will be giving a talk at UPenn @GRASPlab tomorrow 3-4PM EST on my research in sim/robotics. I’ll be discussing how sim integrated robot learning can drive and accelerate robotics progress. If you are in the area let’s meet up! Link with more details in the thread

We at the GRASP Lab were proud to showcase our work at the Philly AI X Robotics workshop! The event was hosted by Penn Engineering and catalyzed by Elaine Cheong. Thank you to Sylvia Zhang @PennEngAI for the photos! #GRASP #GRASPLab #AIandRobotics

Join us TOMORROW in welcoming Dr. David Held who will be presenting “Precise and Generalizable Robot Manipulation” from 10:30AM-11:45AM. For more info: grasp.upenn.edu/events/spring-… #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPonRobotics #GRASPSeminar

The GRASP SFI Seminar featuring Junyao Shi has unfortunately been canceled and will be rescheduled for a later date. Please look out for our announcements of the new date! #GRASP #GRASPLab #GRASPSFI

Prof. René Vidal’s group at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory explored this problem in their recent publication titled “SECA: Semantically Equivalent and Coherent Attacks for Eliciting LLM Hallucinations”... Read more: grasp.upenn.edu/news/simple-re… #GRASPLab #NeurIPS25

Congratulations to @Laparoscopes (@PennSurgery), @delafuentelab (@PennMicro), Julio Chirinos (@PennCardiology) & Seiji Isotani (@PennGSE) on being named @_PennAI Discovering the Future of AI Awardees! tinyurl.com/2vbw96c5

Coming soon on the next episode of Penn Engineering's podcast Innovation & Impact: Tsu-Jae King Liu, President of the National Academy of Engineering (@theNAEng), joins host Vijay Kumar to discuss engineering’s role in shaping the future. From FinFET to national leadership, Liu reflects on the challenges and opportunities facing the field today. Stay tuned.