Manipulation & Environmental Robotics Lab
MER Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute conducts research on robotic manipulation strategies and environmental applications. They integrate computer vision, control theory, and machine learning for skillful and robust manipulation, including benchmarking for dexterous and soft robotics.
Notable achievements
Benchmarking efforts for robotic manipulation, dexterous manipulation, soft robot control research
Notable work
Recent publications
All papers →Matched by this lab's specialties (keyword overlap + direct affiliation)
A hierarchical approach to imitation learning for manipulation tasks requiring time varying forces
Rishabh Shukla, Adithya Santhosh, Shaili Gandhi +2 more
Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing · 2026
Optimization-based shape design of soft-rigid hybrid fingers for adaptive parallel robotic gripper
Yilun Sun, Zengwei Wang, Tim C. Lueth
Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics · 2026
What Are We Actually Benchmarking in Robot Manipulation?
Tianchong Jiang, Xiangshan Tan, Samuel Wheeler +3 more
2026
DLO-Lab: Benchmarking Deformable Linear Object Manipulations with Differentiable Physics
Junyi Cao, Yian Wang, Ziyan Xiong +3 more
2026
DynaFLIP: Rethinking Robotics Perception via Tri-Modal-Dynamics Guided Representation
Jusuk Lee, Seungjae Lee, Jonghun Shin +6 more
2026
VLAConf: Calibrated Task-Success Confidence for Vision-Language-Action Models
Dehao Huang, Aoxiang Gu, Chengjie Zhang +5 more
2026