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Some more pictures of us: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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Welcome to the Perception, Action, & Learning research group at UPenn (PennPAL). We simultaneously push the limits of what can be achieved using today’s prevalent principles in robot learning (“exploit”), and ask foundational questions in robotics towards building better design principles for efficient and minimalist robots in the future (“explore”). As examples of “exploit”, we have trained quadruped robots to perform circus tricks on yoga balls and robot arms to perform household tasks in entirely unseen scenes with unseen objects. As examples of “explore”, we are studying the sensory requirements of robot learners: what sensors do they need and when during training and task execution do they need them? We are motivated in all this work by the grand goal of building general-purpose robots that can help humans in our homes, offices, hospitals, farms, and more.

Note: A more complete research statement, written in August 2025, is here.

Some recent talks that might give you more of a sense of what we have been working on over the years:

Our work is possible because of our funding sources: National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), NEC, GE Research, Amazon AWS, and Penn’s University Research Foundation (URF).

Current PhD students in the lab

Current MS and undergraduate students in the lab

  • Sam Wang (undergraduate)
  • Fiona Luo (undergraduate)
  • Lilian Li (undergraduate)

Student Collaborators

  • Tianyu Li (PhD student advised by Nadia Figueroa)
  • Long Le (PhD student advised by Eric Eaton)

Visiting Students and Postdocs

Past Students and Collaborators

  • Srinath Rajagopalan (MS 2020, next at Amazon Robotics)
  • Adarsh Modh (MS 2020, next at NEC Research Labs America)
  • Kun Huang (MS 2022, next at Cruise Automation), winner of the SEAS outstanding MS Research Award
  • Lloyd Acquaye Thomson (visiting MS student 2021, African Masters in Machine Intelligence program)
  • Kausik Sivakumar (MS 2023, next at Tutor Intelligence), winner of the GRASP MS Research Award
  • Yunshuang Li (MS 2024, next at USC CS PhD Program), winner of the SEAS outstanding MS Research award
  • Alan Zhao (MS 2024, next at Skild.ai)
  • James Springer (MS 2024, next at Anduril Industries)
  • Vaidehi Som (MS 2023, next at Zipline)
  • Tasos Panagopoulos (BS+MS 2024, next at Jane Street)
  • Jason Ma (PhD student 2025, co-advised with Osbert Bastani, next: founded Dyna Robotics)
  • Kaustubh Sridhar (PhD student 2025, advised by Insup Lee and Jim Weimer, next at Google Deepmind)
  • Hungju Wang (MS Student 2025, next at Dyna Robotics)
  • Will Liang (BS 2025, next at UC Berkeley)
  • Kyle Vedder (PhD 2025 advised by Eric Eaton, next at Dyna Robotics)
  • George Gao (MS 2025 advised by Nadia Figueroa, next at Dyna Robotics)
  • Chuan Wen (PhD 2025 at Tsinghua University, advisor: Yang Gao, next faculty at Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
  • Andrew Shen (visiting undergrad 2021, next at CMU MS in ML)
  • Weilin Wan (PhD student at University of Hong Kong, advisor: Taku Komura, 2023-2024)
  • Jingxi Xu (PhD student at Columbia University, advisors: Matei Ciocarlie, Shuran Song, 2020)
  • Oleh Rybkin (PhD student collaborator 2020-now, next postdoc at UC Berkeley)
  • Zhiyang Dou (PhD student at University of Hong Kong, advisors: Wenping Wang and Taku Komura, 2023-2024)

Principal Investigator

  • Dinesh Jayaraman