Bernadette Bucher
About
I am an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Department (primary) and Computer Science and Engineering Department at University of Michigan.
My research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. My research is on learning interpretable visual representations and estimating their uncertainty for use in downstream science and robotics tasks particularly autonomous mobile manipulation.
Previously, I have worked at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, NVIDIA Research, and Lockheed Martin Corporation. I received my PhD in computer science in the GRASP lab at University of Pennsylvania co-advised by Dr. Kostas Daniilidis and Dr. Nikolai Matni. I received an M.A. in Mathematics, M.A. in Economics, and B.S. in Mathematics and Economics from The University of Alabama in 2014.
For more biographical details, please see my CV.
I am recruiting PhD students for my lab to start in Fall 2025!
If you are interested in joining my lab, please apply to the Robotics or CSE departments at Michigan and list me as a faculty of interest. Please do not email me directly regarding PhD applications. I will review every PhD application at one time on which the student includes my name in their application form.
Publications
Jianing Qian, Yunshuang Li, Bernadette Bucher, Dinesh Jayaraman.
Task-Oriented Hierarchical Object Decomposition for Visuomotor Control.
CoRL, 2024.
arXiv / project page / bibtex
Russell Mendonca, Emmanuel Panov, Bernadette Bucher, Jiuguang Wang, Deepak Pathak.
Continuously Improving Mobile Manipulation with Autonomous Real-World RL.
CoRL, 2024.
arXiv / project page / bibtex
Xiaoyi Cai, Siddharth Ancha,
Lakshay Sharma, Philip R. Osteen,
Bernadette Bucher, Stephen Phillips, Jiuguang Wang,
Michael Everett, Nicholas Roy, Jonathan P. How.
EVORA: Deep Evidential Traversability Learning for Risk-Aware Off-Road Autonomy.
T-RO, 2024
CoRL Workshop Towards Reliable and Deployable Learning-based Robotic Systems, 2023.
arXiv / project page / bibtex
Bo Wu, Bruce Lee, Kostas Daniilidis, Bernadette Bucher,
Nikolai Matni.
Uncertainty Aware Deployment of Pre-trained Task Conditioned Imitation Learning Policies.
IROS, 2024.
CoRL Workshop on Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Robotics Towards Reliable Learning-Based Autonomy, 2023.
Naoki Yokoyama, Sehoon Ha, Dhruv Batra,
Jiuguang Wang, Bernadette Bucher.
VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation.
Best Paper in Cognitive Robotics at ICRA 2024. 1 of 3,937 submissions (0.025%).
CoRL Workshop on Language and Robot Learning, 2023.
arXiv / project page / bibtex
Georgios Georgakis*,
Bernadette Bucher*,
Karl Schmeckpeper,
Siddharth Singh,
Kostas Daniilidis.
Learning to Map for Active Semantic Goal Navigation.
ICLR, 2022.
arXiv / project page / code / bibtex
Frederik Ebert,
Yanlai Yang,
Karl Schmeckpeper,
Bernadette Bucher,
Georgios Georgakis,
Kostas Daniilidis,
Chelsea Finn,
Sergey Levine.
Bridge Data: Boosting Generalization of Robotic Skills with Cross-Domain Datasets.
RSS, 2022.
NeurIPS Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning, 2021.
Georgios Georgakis,
Bernadette Bucher,
Anton Arapin,
Karl Schmeckpeper,
Nikolai Matni,
Kostas Daniilidis.
Uncertainty-driven Planner for Exploration and Navigation.
ICRA, 2022.
arXiv / project page / code / bibtex
Bernadette Bucher*,
Karl Schmeckpeper*,
Nikolai Matni,
Kostas Daniilidis.
An Adversarial Objective for Scalable Exploration.
IROS, 2021.
arXiv / project page / code / bibtex
Sudeep Dasari,
Frederik Ebert,
Stephen Tian,
Suraj Nair,
Bernadette Bucher,
Karl Schmeckpeper,
Siddharth Singh,
Sergey Levine,
Chelsea Finn.
RoboNet: Large-Scale Multi-Robot Learning.
CoRL, 2019.
NeurIPS Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning, 2019.
arXiv / project page / code / bibtex
Workshop Papers and Preprints
Bernadette Bucher*, Katrina Ashton*, Bo Wu,
Karl Schmeckpeper,
Nikolai Matni,
Georgios Georgakis,
Kostas Daniilidis.
Unordered Navigation to Multiple Semantic Targets in Novel Environments.
CVPR Embodied AI Workshop, 2023.
Bernadette Bucher*,
Siddharth Singh*,
Clélia de Mulatier,
Kostas Daniilidis,
Vijay Balasubramanian.
Curiosity Increases Equality in Competitive Resource Allocation.
ICLR Workshop on Bridging AI and Cognitive Science, 2020.
Bernadette Bucher*,
Karl Schmeckpeper*,
Nikolai Matni,
Kostas Daniilidis.
Action for Better Prediction.
RSS Workshop on Visual Learning and Reasoning for Robotic Manipulation, 2020.
paper / project page / bibtex
Sadat Shaik*,
Bernadette Bucher*, Nephele Agrafiotis,
Stephen Phillips,
Kostas Daniilidis,
William Schmenner.
Learning Portrait Style Representations.
arXiv Preprint, 2020.
arXiv / dataset / labeling tool / bibtex
Bernadette Bucher,
Anton Arapin,
Ramanan Sekar,
Feifei Duan,
Marc Badger,
Kostas Daniilidis,
Oleh Rybkin.
Perception-Driven Curiosity with Bayesian Surprise.
RSS Workshop on Combining Learning and Reasoning Towards Human-Level Robot Intelligence, 2019.
Kenneth Chaney*,
Bernadette Bucher*,
Evangelos Chatzipantazis,
Jianbo Shi,
Kostas Daniilidis.
Unsupervised Monocular Depth And Latent Structure.
CVPR Workshop on 3D Scene Understanding for Vision, Graphics, and Robotics, 2019.