Kenta Kawamoto
Papers
5
Total Citations
202
H-Index
3
About
Dr. Kenta Kawamoto is a pioneering roboticist whose research bridges humanoid locomotion, developmental robotics, and autonomous racing. His most influential work, with 185 citations, focuses on obstacle avoidance and path planning for Sony’s QRIO humanoid robot using stereo vision—enabling autonomous navigation in cluttered home environments through real-time obstacle detection and map representation. This foundational contribution to mobile manipulation has shaped subsequent work in humanoid autonomy. Kawamoto also explores how robots can learn from visuomotor experience, drawing inspiration from infant development to build generative models that distinguish self from environment. More recently, he has pushed the boundaries of autonomous racing, developing BeTAIL—a Behavior Transformer Adversarial Imitation Learning agent—and a super-human vision-based reinforcement learning system for Gran Turismo. These 2024 works achieve racing performance exceeding expert human drivers without hand-designed physical models or reward functions, demonstrating end-to-end learning under extreme dynamics. Kawamoto’s career uniquely spans embodied cognition, developmental learning, and high-speed control, making him a versatile contributor to both fundamental robotics and cutting-edge AI-driven autonomy.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Obstacle avoidance and path planning for humanoid robots using stereo vision185 citations · 2004
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