I am now a Full Professor at TU Darmstadt. Please see IROSA's website here!!

Georgia Chalvatzaki

Research Interests

Robotics; Perception Systems; Mobile manipulation; Deep Learning; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Human-Robot Interaction & Collaboration

More Information

https://irosalab.com/ Linkedin Google Scholar Curriculum Vitae

Contact Information

Mail. Georgia Chalvatzaki, FG-PEARL, FB-Informatik, TU Darmstadt, Landwehrstraße 50a, Darmstadt, 64293
georgia.chalvatzaki@tu-darmstadt.de

Georgia Chalvatzaki is an Full Professor at TU Darmstadt since April 2023. Before that, she was an Independednt Research Group Leader from March 2021, after getting the renowned Emmy Noether Programme (ENP) fund of the German Research Foundation (DFG). This project was awarded within the ENP Artificial Intelligence call of the DFG – only 9 proposals out of 91 proposals were selected for funding. It enables outstanding young scientists to qualify for a university professorship by independently leading a junior research group over six years.

In her research group iROSA, Dr. Chalvatzaki and her new team will research the topic of "Robot Learning of Mobile Manipulation for Assistive Robotics". Dr. Chalvatzaki proposes new methods at the intersection of machine learning and classical robotics, taking one step further the research for embodied AI robotic assistants. The research in iROSA proposes novel methods for combined planning and learning for enabling mobile manipulator robots to solve complex tasks in house-like environments, with the human-in-the-loop of the interaction process.

From October 2019, she was a Postodoctoral researcher at the Intelligent Autonous Systems group, advised by Jan Peters. Dr. Chalvatzaki completed her Ph.D. studies in 2019 at the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Lab (https://robotics.ntua.gr/ ) at the Electrical and Computer Engineering School of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, with her thesis "Human-Centered Modeling for Assistive Robotics: Stochastic Estimation and Robot Learning in Decision Making." During her career, she has worked on eight research projects, and she has published more than 30 papers ((https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mlho5FkAAAAJ&hl=en ) ), most of which in top-tier robotics and machine learning venues, e.g., ICRA, IROS, RA-L.

Key References

  •     Bib
    Prasad, V.; Heitlinger, L; Koert, D.; Stock-Homburg, R.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (conditionally accepted). Learning Multimodal Latent Dynamics for Human-Robot Interaction, Submitted to the IEEE Transaction of Robotics (T-RO).
  •     Bib
    Urain, J.; Mandlekar, A.; Du, Y.; Shafiullah, M.; Xu, D.; Fragkiadaki, K.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (conditionally accepted). Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).
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    Le, A. T.; Hansel, K.; Carvalho, J.; Watson, J.; Urain, J.; Biess, A.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (accepted). Global Tensor Motion Planning, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
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    Funk, N.; Chen, C.; Schneider, T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Calandra, R.; Peters, J. (2025). On the Importance of Tactile Sensing for Imitation Learning: A Case Study on Robotic Match Lighting, ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”.
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    Pompetzki, K.; Le, A. T.; Gruner, T.; Watson, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2025). Geometrically-Aware Goal Inference: Leveraging Motion Planning as Inference, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
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    Celik, O.; Li, Z.; Blessing, D.; Li, G.; Palenicek, D.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Neumann, G. (2025). Diffusion-Based Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning, 7th Robot Learning Workshop: Towards Robots with Human-Level Abilities (ICLR).
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    Moyen, S. B.; Krohn, R.; Lueth, S.; Pompetzki, K.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2025). Intuitive User Interfaces for Mobile Manipulation, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
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    Funk, N.; Helmut, E.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Calandra, R.; Peters, J. (2024). Evetac: An Event-based Optical Tactile Sensor for Robotic Manipulation, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 40, pp.3812-3832.
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    Tiboni, G.; Klink, P.; Peters, J.; Tommasi, T.; D'Eramo, C.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2024). Domain Randomization via Entropy Maximization, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
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    Goeksu, Y.; Almeida-Correia, A.; Prasad, V.; Kshirsagar, A.; Koert, D.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2024). Kinematically Constrained Human-like Bimanual Robot-to-Human Handovers, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Late Breaking Report.
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    Reddi, A.; Toelle, M.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; D'Eramo, C. (2024). Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning via Bounded Rationality Curricula, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Spotlight.
  •       Bib
    Prasad, V.; Kshirsagar, A; Koert, D.; Stock-Homburg, R.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2024). MoVEInt: Mixture of Variational Experts for Learning Human-Robot Interactions from Demonstrations, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 9, 7, pp.6043--6050.
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    Herrmann, F.; Zach, S.B.; Banfi, J.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Tateo, D. (2024). Safe and Efficient Path Planning under Uncertainty via Deep Collision Probability Fields, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
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    Prasad, V.; Kshirsagar, A; Koert, D.; Stock-Homburg, R.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2024). MoVEInt: Mixture of Variational Experts for Learning HRI from Demonstrations, Workshop on Nonverbal Cues for Human-Robot Cooperative Intelligence at IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
  •     Bib
    Prasad, V.; Kshirsagar, A; Koert, D.; Stock-Homburg, R.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2024). MoVEInt: Mixture of Variational Experts for Learning Human-Robot Interactions from Demonstrations, Workshop on Structural Priors as Inductive Biases for Learning Robot Dynamics at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS).
  •   Bib
    Le, A. T.; Hansel, K.; Carvalho, J.; Urain, J.; Biess, A.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2024). Global Tensor Motion Planning, CoRL 2024 Workshop on Differentiable Optimization Everywhere.
  •       Bib
    Funk, N.; Urain, J.; Carvalho, J.; Prasad, V.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2024). ACTIONFLOW: Equivariant, Accurate, and Efficient Manipulation Policies with Flow Matching, CoRL 2024 Workshop on Mastering Robot Manipulation in a World of Abundant Data.
  •     Bib
    Funk, N.; Urain, J.; Carvalho, J.; Prasad, V.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2024). ActionFlow: Efficient, Accurate, and Fast Policies with Spatially Symmetric Flow Matching, R:SS workshop: Structural Priors as Inductive Biases for Learning Robot Dynamics.
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    Liu, Y.; Belousov, B.; Funk, N.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J.; Tessman, O. (2023). Auto(mated)nomous Assembly, International Conference on Trends on Construction in the Post-Digital Era, pp.167-181, Springer, Cham.
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    Liu, P.; Zhang, K.; Tateo, D.; Jauhri, S.; Hu, Z.; Peters, J. Chalvatzaki, G. (2023). Safe Reinforcement Learning of Dynamic High-Dimensional Robotic Tasks: Navigation, Manipulation, Interaction, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE.
  •       Bib
    Hansel, K.; Urain, J.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2023). Hierarchical Policy Blending as Inference for Reactive Robot Control, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE.
  •       Bib
    Le, A. T.; Hansel, K.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2023). Hierarchical Policy Blending As Optimal Transport, 5th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC), PMLR.
  •       Bib
    Lach, L.; Funk, N.; Haschke, R.; Lemaignan, S.; Ritter, H.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2023). Placing by Touching: An empirical study on the importance of tactile sensing for precise object placing, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
  •     Bib
    Chalvatzaki, G.; Younes, A.; Nandha, D.; Le, A. T.; Ribeiro, L.F.R.; Gurevych, I. (2023). Learning to reason over scene graphs: a case study of finetuning GPT-2 into a robot language model for grounded task planning, in: Dimitrios Kanoulas (eds.), Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
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    Le, A. T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Biess, A.; Peters, J. (2023). Accelerating Motion Planning via Optimal Transport, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS / NeurIPS).
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    Le, A. T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Biess, A.; Peters, J. (2023). Accelerating Motion Planning via Optimal Transport, IROS 2023 Workshop on Differentiable Probabilistic Robotics: Emerging Perspectives on Robot Learning, [Oral].
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    Mittenbuehler, M.; Hendawy, A.; D'Eramo, C.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2023). Parameter-efficient Tuning of Pretrained Visual-Language Models in Multitask Robot Learning, CoRL 2023 Workshop on Learning Effective Abstractions for Planning (LEAP).
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    Le, A. T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Biess, A.; Peters, J. (2023). Accelerating Motion Planning via Optimal Transport, NeurIPS 2023 Workshop Optimal Transport and Machine Learning, [Oral].
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    Belousov, B.; Wibranek, B.; Schneider, J.; Schneider, T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J.; Tessmann, O. (2022). Robotic Architectural Assembly with Tactile Skills: Simulation and Optimization, Automation in Construction, 133, pp.104006.
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    Urain, J.*; Le, A.T.*; Lambert, A.*; Chalvatzaki, G.; Boots, B.; Peters, J. (2022). Learning Implicit Priors for Motion Optimization, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
  •     Bib
    Liu, P.; Zhang, K.; Tateo, D.; Jauhri, S.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; (2022). Regularized Deep Signed Distance Fields for Reactive Motion Generation, 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
  •       Bib
    Funk, N.; Menzenbach, S.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2022). Graph-based Reinforcement Learning meets Mixed Integer Programs: An application to 3D robot assembly discovery, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
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    Schneider, T.; Belousov, B.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Romeres, D.; Jha, D.K.; Peters, J. (2022). Active Exploration for Robotic Manipulation, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
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    Prasad, V.; Koert, D.; Stock-Homburg, R.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2022). MILD: Multimodal Interactive Latent Dynamics for Learning Human-Robot Interaction, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids).
  •   Bib
    Liu, P.; Zhang, K.; Tateo, D.; Jauhri, S.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (2022). ReDSDF: Regularized Deep Signed Distance Fields for Robotics, ICRA 2022 workshop on Motion Planning with Implicit Neural Representations of Geometry.
  •   Bib
    Le, A. T.; Urain, J.; Lambert, A.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Boots, B.; Peters, J. (2022). Learning Implicit Priors for Motion Optimization, RSS 2022 Workshop on Implicit Representations for Robotic Manipulation.
  •     Bib
    Dam, T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J.; Pajarinen, J. (2022). Monte-carlo robot path planning, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 7, 4, pp.11213-11220.
  •     Bib
    Tosatto, S.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2021). Contextual Latent-Movements Off-Policy Optimization for Robotic Manipulation Skills, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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    Li, Q.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J.; Wang, Y. (2021). Directed Acyclic Graph Neural Network for Human Motion Prediction, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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    Morgan, A.; Nandha, D.; Chalvatzaki, G.; D'Eramo, C.; Dollar, A.; Peters, J. (2021). Model Predictive Actor-Critic: Accelerating Robot Skill Acquisition with Deep Reinforcement Learning, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
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    Funk, N.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Belousov, B.; Peters, J. (2021). Learn2Assemble with Structured Representations and Search for Robotic Architectural Construction, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL).