Kumar Manas

Engineer, learner and truth seeker
Robot Learning| PEARL lab, TU Darmstadt | Robotic Manipulation and Automated Driving

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@CSProfKGD Your sabbatical showed us so many shades of Zurich, and hope you had a lot of fun and amazing memories!!

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@CSProfKGD You are so right. Last month, it took just 30 min by tram from ETH. Quite convinent l

[Georgia Chalvatzaki @GeorgiaChal]

Just returned from Vienna after attending the @ieee_ras_icra #ICRA2026—my very first one back after maternity leave!

What an incredible experience. I truly think this was one of the best ICRAs to date. Huge congratulations to Markus Vincze, Tamim Asfour, and the entire organizing team for pulling off such a monumental event! 🇦🇹🤖

The PEARL Lab—along with our youngest honorary member 👶—had a phenomenal time. Between presenting our latest work and engaging in deeply fruitful discussions with the community, it was incredibly rewarding. Traveling to a major conference with a toddler is a completely different kind of logistics challenge, but seeing the community so welcoming makes it all worth it!

I am also profoundly grateful to have co-organized a highly successful @ieeeras Women in Engineering (WiE) Luncheon. This was a bittersweet milestone, as it was my final one serving as Chair of the committee. I’m immensely proud of what we have achieved together so far and thrilled to hand the reins over to the brilliant new leadership.

Now, I’m shifting gears back to my duties as Program Co-Chair for the @corl_conf #CoRL2026 ⚙️

I am leaving Vienna fully recharged with fresh ideas and new perspectives for our ongoing research into Structured Robot Learning. We have some incredibly exciting work ahead for the SIREN project, generously funded by the @ERC_Research and the the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung.

Stay tuned for what’s next from https://t.co/7ncjMayHwi! 🚀

#Robotics #RobotLearning #WomenInSTEM #WomenInRobotics #EmbodiedAI

[Georgia Chalvatzaki @GeorgiaChal]

🤖 @ieee_ras_icra is almost here, and the PEARL Lab is bringing the whole crew to Vienna! Here is where to catch us. 👇

🗓️ Monday is workshop day, and a busy one for me: three invited talks and two panels.
• 09:50, Stolz 2: invited talk at “Dexterity with Multifingered Hands,” then the panel at 11:40
• 11:00, Hall A1: invited talk at the RL in the Era of Imitation Learning workshop
• 14:30, VIP Lounge C: “Structured Robot Learning for Rigorous Manipulation: From Perception to Action” at the Rigorous Robot Perception workshop, then the roundtable at 16:30

🥊 And to close the week, on Friday, I am on the “Geometry in the Age of Data-Driven Robotics” debate, Friday 11:00 in Hall C4 (full panel at 16:00), arguing the contra side of the claim: “The vast majority of interesting research questions on the role of geometry in robotics have already been answered.” Come heckle.

But the part I am most excited about is the team. Their work is everywhere this week.

📄 Main conference (Interactive Sessions, Hall C, 09:00 to 10:30):
• Tue: @AoiAoi83259839 presents “Stein Variational Ergodic Surface Coverage with SE(3) Constraints” (TuI1I.226)
• Wed: @an_thai_le presents “Global Tensor Motion Planning” (WeI1I.68); @FrankieZhang41 presents “Adaptive Diffusion Constrained Sampling for Bimanual Robot Manipulation” (WeI1I.112); @yjin_1118 and @FatAndFurious42 present “SE(3)-PoseFlow: Estimating 6D Pose Distributions for Uncertainty-Aware Robotic Manipulation” (WeI1I.194)
• Thu: @SnehalJauhri @SophieLueth present UniFField: A Generalizable Unified Neural Feature Field for Visual, Semantic, and Spatial Uncertainties in Any Scene (ThI1I.226)

🧑‍🔬 In the workshops:
Monday
• @SnehalJauhri, “UniFField: A Generalizable Unified Neural Feature Field for Visual, Semantic, and Spatial Uncertainties in Any Scene” @ MM-Spatial AI for Robust Navigation and Open-World Understanding (Lehar 3) AND Act to Sense to Act Better (Hall C4)
• Magnus Dierking, “Real-World Deployment of Massively Parallel Sampling-Based MPC for Contact-Rich Manipulation” @ Frontiers of Optimization for Robotics (Lehar 4)
• @kumarmanas27, “Vision-Language Modeling for Natural-Language Wheel Loader Assistance in Unstructured Construction Environments” @ Long-term Deployments in the Wild (Strauss 2)
• @kumarmanas27 & Franziska Herbert, “Hierarchical Scene Graphs and Contact-Aware Behavior Trees for Bimanual Manipulation” @ CR2 (Lehar 2)
• @RKrohn_, “Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning” @ CR2 (Lehar 2)
• @AoiAoi83259839, “IMPACT: An Implicit Active-Set Augmented Lagrangian for Fast Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization” @ CR2 (Lehar 2)
• Franziska Herbert, “Semantic-Geometric Task Representations for Bimanual Manipulation from Human Demonstrations to Robot Action Planning” (RA-L) @ Shared Challenges in Human-Centered and Resilient Robotic Autonomy (Hall C6)

Friday
• @SnehalJauhri , “MolmoBot: Large-Scale Simulation Enables Zero-Shot Manipulation” (spotlight!) and “Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation using Offline RL on Sub-optimal Controllers” (WHOLE-MoMa) @ Beyond Teleoperation (Strauss 3)
• @SophieLueth, “CoFlow: Residual Hierarchical Flow Matching for Effective Physical Human-Robot Collaboration” @ Bridging the Gap between Robot Learning and HRI (Hall A2)
• Max Siebenborn, “Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation,” spotlight @ Geometry in the Age of Data-Driven Robotics (Hall C4)
• @RKrohn_, “Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning” @ Manipulation Robustness (Hall A3)
•@FatAndFurious42, “Task-Aware Bimanual Affordance Prediction via VLM-Guided Semantic-Geometric Reasoning” and Franziska’s RA-L paper @ Semantics for Reliable Robot Autonomy (VIP Lounge C)

If you are in Vienna, please stop by our talks and posters. We would love to chat. 👋 #ICRA2026

[Kosta Derpanis (back home, Toronto ❤️) @CSProfKGD]

Thank you for the tour of your lab’s latest work @GeorgiaChal 💪

It was also great to finally meet you!

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

Checkout this new work from Rick!!
It was quite an interesting show from him in the lab. We had lot of fun while messing up with the lighting condition and at the same time I was amazed with the performance in low intensity light for such an intricate task.

[Rickmer Krohn @RKrohn_]

Solving contact-rich manipulation tasks even under disco light🪩?
Incorporate multiple sensors using MSDP and obtain a robust policy in under 55 min!
Excited to share our work accepted at RA-L: Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning

[Rickmer Krohn @RKrohn_]

Solving contact-rich manipulation tasks even under disco light🪩?
Incorporate multiple sensors using MSDP and obtain a robust policy in under 55 min!
Excited to share our work accepted at RA-L: Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning

[Georgia Chalvatzaki @GeorgiaChal]

🚀 Hiring PhDs & Postdocs in Structured Robot Learning & Embodied AI @TUDarmstadt (PEARL Lab)

🤖 We study how structure in the robot–environment system can be exploited to learn robust, adaptive, and generalizable behaviors, beyond black-box policies

🔬 Topics:
• Grounding (language → perception → action)
• Structured world models
• VLA + control + memory
• RL (credit assignment, offline→online)
• Whole-body & bimanual mobile manipulation

🇪🇺 New EU Lighthouse Project on Generative AI for Robotics + ERC StG SIREN

👉 Full call: https://t.co/VxcornBuo9

Please repost 🙏

#RobotLearning #EmbodiedAI #Robotics #MachineLearning #PhDPositions #Postdoc

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@gothburz witnessed this firsthand during my time in corporate:add AI to everything simply for the sake of appearances, to show that we were using it.' Meanwhile, executives failed to empower the actual end user (developers), with the real tools that genuinely boost productivity.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@tarun_05 @ShuaichenChang Seems like I wasted my weekend. Usually, I review paper as I am reading it for my own sake but this year it was insane compared to last year. Or possibly I got the wrong sample to review this time :(

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@beaversteever I always make my take home assignment public within 1 week of interview with copyright notice in the code. Many companies use them as free workforce. Also, never accept a take home assignment which takes more than 3 hours.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@ShivAroor Makhana ka kheer, bagia, Dahi-Chura (not Chura-dahi), Tilkor Tarua.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@eurofounder I used to earn 18K a year while working just 20 hours a week as a student employee in a mid-size German city. On top of that, students used to pay minimal tax, unlike full-time employees.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@InvestorOfJAMMU You get what you pay.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@TVMohandasPai @narendramodi @sanjeevsanyal No need of tagging him. It is trickle down effects, from government officer to political parties to the very top. No one can stop it.

[Georgia Chalvatzaki @GeorgiaChal]

Such a wonderful first day at #CoRL2025 catching up with old friends and making new ones.

If you’re interested in our work at PEARL and share our vision of structured robot learning for achieving efficient and robust robot behaviors among humans, reach out!

We’re hiring
•PhD positions (through ELLIS: https://t.co/wpVSDRrMD9)
•Postdoc positions (open call: https://t.co/381x3ALuBg)

#RobotLearning #EmbodiedAI #RepresentationLearning #ImitationLearning #ReinforcementLearning #MobileManipulation #DexterousManipulation #HumanRobotInteraction #PhDPositions #PostdocOpportunity

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@shantanugoel Karnataka has the same number as Bihar. Biggest lol.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@theskindoctor13 @sailorsmoon Bhai sahab, aap kis line me aa gaye :p

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@KantInEastt It simply shows how clean things are. In European airport I always see group of people sitting on the floor and having nice chat.

[Kumar Manas @kumarmanas27]

@KantInEastt In my and my bubble, passport office is the best functional citizen service in India. There are always some problems, which happens everywhere. Last year I renewed my passport involving police verification, still it took me just a week to get my passport. (But corrupt police)