NEMS is an annual research symposium in the Northeast focused on robotic manipulation research of all kinds, including algorithms, control, mechanics, perception, and machine learning. NEMS has two main goals. First, we want to provide an opportunity for members of the Northeast robotic manipulation research community to meet and talk in person, share ideas, and become familiar with each other’s work. Second, we want to provide students and early-career researchers a platform from which to present their latest work.
NEMS is free and will be held on Friday, May 31, 2024 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Northeastern University’s East Village, 17th floor. If you plan to attend, please register below so we have an accurate headcount.
NEMS 2024 is co-organized this year by Rob Platt (rplatt@ccs.neu.edu) and Peter Whitney (j.whitney@northeastern.edu).
Contribute
We are soliciting two page extended abstracts, due May 10. These abstracts are non archival. All submissions will be given a poster presentation. A subset of submissions will be given oral presentations at the symposium. If you would like to demo your research, please submit an extended abstract and describe your demo there. If you need additional support for the demo (e.g. a table or power), please email Rob or Peter, this year’s NEMS organizers.
Schedule
| 8:55 – 9:05 | Introduction Rob Platt and Peter Whitney Northeastern |
| 9:05 – 9:30 | Keynote Speaker: Hierarchical Contact Tuning in Soft Robotic Grippers Kaitlyn Becker MIT |
| 9:30 – 9:45 | Bidirectional Human-Robot Feedback and Physical Effects of Assisted Manipulation with a Robotic Hand Orthosis for Stroke Ava Chen Columbia |
| 9:45 – 10:00 | Self-assembling Soft Modular Robots for Manipulation Luyang Zhao Dartmouth |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Augmented Tactile Sensing During Training Allows for Efficient Learning and Cheap Deployment Ludovico Papavassiliou Harvard |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | GROUNDING LANGUAGE PLANS IN DEMONSTRATIONS THROUGH COUNTERFACTUAL PERTURBATIONS Felix Yanwei Wang MIT |
| 10:30 – 10:37 | Sponsor Talk: Be a Part of the Future of Robotic Manipulation! Lael Odhner AI Institute |
| 10:37 – 11:10 | Coffee Break with Poster Session/Demos |
| 11:10 – 11:25 | Towards a Dynamic Table Tennis Playing Robot David Nguyen MIT |
| 11:25 – 11:40 | Design of a Dexterous Gripper with Multimodal Tactile Sensing Andrew SaLoutos MIT |
| 11:40 – 11:55 | A Fractal Suction-based Robotic Gripper for Versatile Grasping Jakub Kowalewski Northeastern |
| 11:55 – 12:10 | Force Control of Series Elastic Pneumatic Underactuated Gripper Chunpeng Wang Northeastern |
| 12:10 – 12:25 | Equivariant Diffusion Policy Dian Wang Northeastern |
| 12:25 – 12:32 | Sponsor Talk, Amazon Amazon |
| 12:32 – 1:35 | Lunch with Poster Session/Demos |
| 1:35 – 2:00 | Keynote Kostas Bekris Rutgers |
| 2:00 – 2:15 | On Bringing Robots Home Nur Muhammad “Mahi” Shafiullah NYU |
| 2:15 – 2:30 | PolyTask: Learning Unified Policies through Behavior Distillation Siddhant Haldar NYU |
| 2:30 – 2:45 | Resolution Complete In-Place Object Retrieval given Known Object Models Daniel Nakhimovich Rutgers |
| 2:45 – 3:00 | Plan-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Whole-Body Manipulation Aykut Onol TRI |
| 3:00 – 3:30 | Coffee Break with Poster Session/Demos |
| 3:30 – 3:45 | Effect of Gripper Load Distribution on Human Package Opening Demonstrations Natalija Beslic UMass |
| 3:45 – 4:00 | Towards an Efficient Synthetic Image Data Pipeline for Training Vision-Based Robot Systems Peter Gavriel UML |
| 4:00 – 4:15 | Collaborative Open-source Manipulation Performance Assessment for Robotics Enhancement (COMPARE) Ecosystem Adam Norton UML |
| 4:15 – 4:30 | Leveraging Dexterous Picking Skills for Complex Multi-Object Scenes Mihir Pradeep Deshmukh WPI |
| 4:30 – 4:45 | Not Twisting Your Arm: Combining Grasping and Rotation in a Single Robot Hand Mechanism Vatsal Patel Yale |
| 4:45 – 5:00 | Direct Self-Identification of Inverse Jacobians for Dexterous Manipulation Through Particle Filtering Joshua T. Grace Yale |
| 5:00 – 5:10 | Closing Remarks |
Registration
Tickets for the NEMS Conference are sold out.
Location
NEMS 2024 will be held at East Village, 17th floor, at 291 St. Botolph St., in Boston, Mass.
Public Transportation
When planning your transportation needs, please consider that during the work day, city traffic is often congested and parking on or near campus is very limited. Luckily, Northeastern is optimally serviced by many public transit spots such as Ruggles Station (Orange Line) and the Northeastern stop (Green Line).
To travel from Boston to Northeastern University using the MBTA:
Subway (T)
- Take the Green Line E branch (also known as the “E Line”) outbound towards Heath Street.
- Exit the train at the “Northeastern University” station.
- Northeastern University East Village is within walking distance from the station.
- Alternatively, you may take the Orange Line to the “Massachusetts Ave” station.
- East Village is within walking distance from the station.
Commuter Rail
- If you are coming from a location outside of Boston and closer to a Commuter Rail station, you can take a Commuter Rail train that services the Ruggles station.
- From Ruggles station, it’s just a short walk to Northeastern University East Village.
Bus
- Various MBTA buses service the Northeastern University area. You can check the MBTA website or use the Transit app for specific bus routes and schedules that best suit your location.
- It is essential to check the MBTA’s official website or use real-time transit apps like Transit or Google Maps to get the most up-to-date schedules and routes, as they may change from time to time.
Parking
Prices vary at these locations.
Renaissance Park Garage
835 Columbus Avenue
Boston, MA 02120
0.4 miles, 9 minutes walking distance
Contact
For more information, please contact the 2024 NEMS organizers: Rob Platt (rplatt@ccs.neu.edu) or Peter Whitney (j.whitney@northeastern.edu).
Past Conferences
Sponsors
