Welcome to the Choice Robotics Lab website! The lab is located in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota (UofM), Twin Cities. The lab name CHOICE stands for Cleverly Helping rObots In Challenging Environments (CHOICE). It also informally means Choi's lab following the PI's last name.
The long-term research goal of our lab is to design computational learning models that enable robots to
- perceive the world,
- understand tasks, and
- perform manipulation skills
so that society benefits from affordable, reliable labor forces. Toward this long-term goal, we study object grasping, manipulation, object perception, reinforcement learning, and their novel combinations (see Research for details).
News
- Mar 2024: PI receives the Sony Research Award (Faculty Innovation Award, $100K).
- Jan 2024: Two papers (SlotGNN, deformable object insertion) are accepted for IEEE ICRA 2024.
- Dec 2023: One journal based on our previous ICRA paper (attribute-based grasping) is accepted for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).
- Aug 2023: One paper (KINet) is published in IEEE RA-L and will be presented at IEEE ICRA 2024.
- Aug 2023: PI will serve as a Workshop Associate Editor for IEEE ICRA 2024.
- Jun 2023: Three papers (IOSG, object rearrangement, mass estimation) are accepted for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2023.
- May 2023: PI will give an invited talk at IROS 2023 IPPC Workshop.
- May 2023: Xibai successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and will join Amazon Robotics.
- Jan 2023: One paper (federated object grasping) is accepted for ICRA 2023.
- Jan 2023: PI will serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2023.
- July 2022: One paper (segmentation by manipulation) is accepted for ECCV 2022.
- June 2022: One paper (environment-enabled grasping) is accepted for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2022.
- May 2022: One of our ICRA papers (interactive grasping) won the IEEE ICRA 2022 Outstanding Student Paper award.
- May 2022: Yang successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and joins Meta (a.k.a. Facebook).
- Mar 2022: PI receives the NSF Career Award.
- Feb 2022: Two papers (interactive grasping, GNN-based grasping) are accepted for IEEE ICRA 2022.
- Jan 2022: PI will serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2022.
- Jan 2022: PI receives the MnRI Seed Grant with Prof. Jin.
- Dec 2021: PI receives Grant-in-Aid (GIA) - New Assistant Professor from UMN.
- Dec 2021: PI receives Russell J. Penrose Excellence in Teaching Award from ECE, UMN.
- Aug 2021: PI will serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE ICRA 2022.
- Mar 2021: PI receives the Sony Research Award (Faculty Innovation Award, $100K).
- Mar 2021: Three papers (attribute-based grasping, collision-aware grasping, grasping via fixtures) are accepted for IEEE ICRA 2021.
- Feb 2021: PI will serve on Organizing Committee for RiTA 2021 as a Special Session Chair and an Associate Editor.
- Feb 2021: PI will serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2021.
- Feb 2021: A Robotics MS student, Eddie Sasagawa, joins the lab.
- Jan 2021: PI receives the MnRI Seed Grant with Prof. Sattar.
- Dec 2020: Yang Yang is selected as one of the recipients of the UMII MnDRIVE Ph.D. Graduate Assistantship (robotics area, $25K for 1 year GRA).
- Nov 2020: A Robotics MS student, Ross Worobel, joins the lab.
- Oct 2020: PI co-advises a CS&E Ph.D. student, Song Liu, working with Prof. He.
- Sep 2020: Two new Ph.D. students, Alireza Rezazadeh and Houjian Yu, join the lab.
- Aug 2020: PI co-advises an ECE Ph.D. student, Jiacheng Yuan, working with Prof. Isler.
- May 2020: Our paper about reachability-aware grasping is published in IEEE ICRA 2020.
- Apr 2020: Our grasping the invisible work is published in IEEE RA-L.
- Sep 2019: A CS&E MS student, Abhinav Mehta, joins the lab.
- Apr 2019: A CS&E Ph.D. student, Yang Yang, joins the lab.
- Sep 2018: Two new Ph.D. students, Xibai Lou and Hengyue Liang, join the lab.
- Jan 2018: PI (Prof. Choi) joins UMN ECE and establishes the Choice Robotics Lab.