Publications

Papers from the lab.

Peer-reviewed and preprint work from 2024 onward, listed with venue and year. Where a paper has an accompanying release, it is noted alongside.

2026

2
ICRA 2026

FlowBench: A Benchmark for Embodied Perceive–Plan–Act Systems

E. Vasquez, P. Raghavan, D. Okafor, S. Whitmore

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

A benchmark that evaluates perception, planning, and control together rather than in isolation, measuring how errors in one stage propagate through the full loop. Released with the FlowBench suite in our open-source repository.

IROS 2026

A Unified Token Interface for Perception, Planning, and Control

E. Vasquez, M. Lindqvist, Y. Tanaka

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

We study a single token vocabulary shared by all three stages of the loop, and what is gained — and lost — when perception, planning, and control read and write the same representation.

2025

3
CoRL 2025

Latent World Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation

D. Okafor, E. Vasquez, S. Whitmore

Conference on Robot Learning

A latent world model trained to predict the effect of contact-heavy actions, letting a manipulator plan against imagined futures for insertion and assembly tasks where analytic models fall short.

IROS 2025

Closing the Sim-to-Real Gap via Adversarial Domain Distillation

D. Okafor, Y. Tanaka, S. Whitmore

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

We treat the sim-to-real gap as an adversarial problem, distilling a policy through a discriminator that is trained to tell simulated rollouts from recorded hardware runs, and report transfer without task-specific tuning.

ICRA 2025

Perceive–Plan–Act with Predictive Uncertainty in Cluttered Scenes

P. Raghavan, E. Vasquez

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

An architecture that carries calibrated predictive uncertainty from perception through planning, so the robot can prefer trajectories whose outcomes it can actually foresee — and hesitate where it cannot.

2024

2
RSS 2024

Learning Reactive Whole-Body Control from Language-Conditioned Demonstrations

M. Lindqvist, E. Vasquez, Y. Tanaka

Robotics: Science and Systems

Whole-body policies learned from language-conditioned demonstration, retaining reactive behaviour so the robot can recover from disturbance instead of replanning from scratch.

CoRL 2024

Neural Potential Fields for Real-Time Motion Planning at Scale

Y. Tanaka, M. Lindqvist

Conference on Robot Learning

Learned potential fields that trade the global guarantees of classical planners for real-time behaviour in large, dynamic environments, with the failure modes we observed reported alongside the results.