Bernadette Bucher

Bernadette Bucher

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Department (primary) and Computer Science and Engineering Department at University of Michigan. I lead the Mapping and Motion Lab which studies robot learning and computer vision.

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.

Email / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

Publications

HydroShear

An Dang, Jayjun Lee, Mustafa Mukadam, X. Alice Wu, Bernadette Bucher, Manikantan Nambi, Nima Fazeli.
HydroShear: Hydroelastic Shear Simulation for Tactile Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning.
RSS, 2026.

arXiv / project page / code / bibtex

GraphIL

Jianing Qian, Qinhe Peng, Emmanuel Panov, Leonor Fermoselle, Dinesh Jayaraman*, Bernadette Bucher*, Tarik Kelestemur*.
Expanding Spatial and Temporal Context for Robotic Imitation Learning With Scene Graphs.
CVPR, 2026.

arXiv / bibtex

ASHiTA

Yun Chang, Leonor Fermoselle, Duy Ta, Bernadette Bucher, Luca Carlone, Jiuguang Wang.
ASHiTA: Automatic Scene-grounded HIerarchical Task Analysis.
CVPR, 2025.

arXiv / bibtex

HODOR

Jianing Qian, Yunshuang Li, Bernadette Bucher, Dinesh Jayaraman.
Task-Oriented Hierarchical Object Decomposition for Visuomotor Control.
CoRL, 2024.

arXiv / project page / bibtex

Continuous RL

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

Uncertainty Aware IL

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

Uncertainty Aware IL

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.

arXiv / bibtex

VLFM

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

Learning to Map

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

Bridge Data

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.

arXiv / project page (code and dataset) / bibtex

Uncertainty-driven Planner

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

Adversarial Exploration

Bernadette Bucher*, Karl Schmeckpeper*, Nikolai Matni, Kostas Daniilidis.
An Adversarial Objective for Scalable Exploration.
IROS, 2021.

arXiv / project page / code / bibtex

RoboNet

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