I have moved to University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT, USA where I am an Assistant Professor. Check out my new homepage ...

Tucker Hermans

Tucker Hermans is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. You can see his most up to date information at his Utah website.

Tucker was a postdoctoral researcher in the Intelligent Autonomous System (IAS) lab at TU Darmstadt working on tactile manipulation and robot learning from April 2014 to July 2015. He was the team leader at TU Darmstadt for the European Commission TACMAN project. Tucker joined the lab after receiving his PhD in robotics from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Tucker's research focuses on autonomous learning and perception in robots. His dissertation research dealt with robots learning to discover and manipulate previously unknown objects. The learning was performed on a Willow Garage PR2 robot, which performed pushing tasks through visual feedback control.

Prior to coming to TU Darmstadt Tucker was at Georgia Tech from 2009 to 2014. There he earned his PhD in Robotics under the supervision of Aaron Bobick and Jim Rehg in the Computational Perception Laboratory. At Georgia Tech Tucker also earned an MSc in Computer Science with specialization in Computational Perception and Robotics. Tucker earned his bachelors from Bowdoin College, where he double majored in Computer Science and German. At Bowdoin Tucker was a member and team captain of the Northern Bites SPL RoboCup team, who placed first in the world in 2007, placed third in 2008, and were runner-up in 2009. Tucker has additionally developed computer forensics software for the Maine State Police.

Workshop at RSS 2015

I'm co-organizing a workshop at RSS this summer on Visual and Tactile Learning for Interaction and Manipulation.

Moving to Utah

I'm excited to announce I'm starting as an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah in August!

Research interests

• Learning for robotic manipulation
• Affordance learning
• Real-world robot manipulation
• Never-ending robot learning
• Robot grasping and manipulation in clutter
• Tactile sensing for robotics
• Computer and robot vision

Key References

1. •     Bib
     Hermans, T.; Li, F.; Rehg, J. M.; Bobick, A. F. (2013). Learning Contact Locations for Pushing and Orienting Unknown Objects, International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS).
2. •     Bib
     Hermans, T.; Rehg, J. M.; Bobick, A. F. (2012). Guided Pushing for Object Singulation, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
3. •     Bib
     Hermans, T.; Rehg, J. M.; Bobick, A. F. (2011). Affordance Prediction via Learned Object Attributes, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA): Workshop on Semantic Perception, Mapping, and Exploration.
4. •     Bib
     Hoelscher, J.; Peters, J.; Hermans, T. (2015). Evaluation of Interactive Object Recognition with Tactile Sensing, Proceedings of the International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS).

For a full list of Tucker's publications please see his Publication Page

Videos and Data

Details and data from my work on visual saliency from RGB-D data can be found here.

1. for our IROS 2011 paper on push planning.
2. for our IROS 2012 paper on singulation of cluttered scenes.
3. for our ICRA 2013 paper on affordance representations and exploration.
4. demonstrating our work on learning stable pushing locations. Associated with our ICDL 2013 and Humanoids 2013 papers.

Supervised Theses at IAS