Maria Villalonga
MIT
bauza@mit.edu
Bio
Maria Bauza Villalonga is a PhD student in Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Professor Alberto Rodriguez. Before that she received Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Physics from CFIS an excellence center at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Her research focuses on combining tactile and visual information to enhance robot dexterity during object manipulation. Maria has received several fellowships including Facebook NVIDIA or LaCaixa fellowships. Her research has obtained awards such as the Best Cognitive Paper award at IROS 2018 and Best Paper award finalist at IROS 2016. She was also part of the MIT-Princeton Team participating in the Amazon Robotics Challenge winning the stowing task in 2017 and receiving the 2018 Amazon Best Systems Paper Award in Manipulation.
Precise generalization: how to make robotic manipulation scalable and reliable
Precise generalization: how to make robotic manipulation scalable and reliable
I develop algorithms that enable embodied intelligence by making robots perceive and interact with their environment accurately. In my work I have studied the power of combining the most recent advances in AI and computer vision to precisely control a wide range of robotic systems; and the capabilities of high-resolution tactile sensing to aid grasping localization and precise placing. My goal is to effectively leverage perception control and planning tools to make robots accurate while dexterous at solving a wide range of manipulation tasks.