Kirsty Ellis

Toward Hardware-Agnostic Quadrupedal World Models via Morphology Conditioning

Chenhao Li

Marco Hutter

World models promise a paradigm shift in robotics, where an agent learns the underlying physics of its environment once to enable efficient … (see more)planning and behavior learning. However, current world models are often hardware-locked specialists: a model trained on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot fails catastrophically on a Unitree Go1 due to the mismatch in kinematic and dynamic properties, as the model overfits to specific embodiment constraints rather than capturing the universal locomotion dynamics. Consequently, a slight change in actuator dynamics or limb length necessitates training a new model from scratch. In this work, we take a step towards a framework for training a generalizable Quadrupedal World Model (QWM) that disentangles environmental dynamics from robot morphology. We address the limitations of implicit system identification, where treating static physical properties (like mass or limb length) as latent variables to be inferred from motion history creates an adaptation lag that can compromise zero-shot safety and efficiency. Instead, we explicitly condition the generative dynamics on the robot's engineering specifications. By integrating a physical morphology encoder and a reward normalizer, we enable the model to serve as a neural simulator capable of generalizing across morphologies. This capability unlocks zero-shot control across a range of embodiments. We introduce, for the first time, a world model that enables zero-shot generalization to new morphologies for locomotion. While we carefully study the limitations of our method, QWM operates as a distribution-bounded interpolator within the quadrupedal morphology family rather than a universal physics engine, this work represents a significant step toward morphology-conditioned world models for legged locomotion.

2026-04-08

arXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Toward Self-Driven Microscopy Exploration for the Characterization of Functional Materials

Claudia M. Bazán

Kirsty Ellis

Faisal Mohamed

Ramzi Zidani

Maxime Goulet

Jean-Nicolas Deraspe

Jeanine Looman

Glen Berseth

Delphine Bouilly

Audrey Laventure

2026-03-14

AI4X @ Neural Information Processing Systems (poster)

openreview.net

RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies

Pranav Atreya

Karl Pertsch

Tony Lee

Moo Jin Kim

Arhan Jain

Artur Kuramshin

Cyrus Neary

Edward S. Hu

Kanav Arora

Kirsty Ellis

Luca Macesanu

Matthew Leonard

Meedeum Cho

Özgür Aslan

Shivin Dass

Tony Wang

Xingfang Yuan

Abhishek Gupta

Dinesh Jayaraman

Glen Berseth … (see 6 more)

Kostas Daniilidis

Roberto Martín-Martín

Youngwoon Lee

Percy Liang

Chelsea Finn

Sergey Levine

2025-10-06

Proceedings of The 8th Conference on Robot Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Object-Centric Agentic Robot Policies

Executing open-ended natural language queries in previously unseen environments is a core problem in robotics. While recent advances in imit… (see more)ation learning and vision-language modeling have enabled promising end-to-end policies, these models struggle when faced with complex instructions and new scenes. Their short input context also limits their ability to solve tasks over larger spatial horizons. In this work, we introduce OCARP, a modular agentic robot policy that executes user queries by using a library of tools on a dynamic inventory of objects. The agent builds the inventory by grounding query-relevant objects using a rich 3D map representation that includes open-vocabulary descriptors and 3D affordances. By combining the flexible reasoning abilities of an agent with a general spatial representation, OCARP can execute complex open-vocabulary queries in a zero-shot manner. We showcase how OCARP can be deployed in both tabletop and mobile settings due to the underlying scalable map representation.

2025-09-22

NeurIPS.cc/2025/Workshop/SpaVLE (poster)

openreview.net

DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset

Alexander Khazatsky

Karl Pertsch

Suraj Nair

Ashwin Balakrishna

Sudeep Dasari

Siddharth Karamcheti

Soroush Nasiriany

Mohan Kumar Srirama

Lawrence Yunliang Chen

Kirsty Ellis

Peter David Fagan

Joey Hejna

Masha Itkina

Marion Lepert

Yecheng Jason Ma

Ye Ma

Patrick Tree Miller

Jimmy Wu

Suneel Belkhale

Shivin Dass … (see 82 more)

Huy Ha

Arhan Jain

Abraham Lee

Youngwoon Lee

Marius Memmel

Sungjae Park

Ilija Radosavovic

Kaiyuan Wang

Albert Zhan

Kevin Black

Cheng Chi

Kyle Beltran Hatch

Shan Lin

Jingpei Lu

Jean Mercat

Abdul Rehman

Pannag R Sanketi

Archit Sharma

Cody Simpson

Quan Vuong

Homer Rich Walke

Blake Wulfe

Ted Xiao

Jonathan Heewon Yang

Arefeh Yavary

Tony Z. Zhao

Christopher Agia

Rohan Baijal

Mateo Guaman Castro

Daphne Chen

Qiuyu Chen

Trinity Chung

Jaimyn Drake

Ethan Paul Foster

Jensen Gao

David Antonio Herrera

Minho Heo

Kyle Hsu

Jiaheng Hu

Muhammad Zubair Irshad

Donovon Jackson

Charlotte Le

Xinyu Lin

Yunshuang Li

K. Lin

Roy Lin

Zehan Ma

Abhiram Maddukuri

Suvir Mirchandani

Daniel Morton

Tony Khuong Nguyen

Abigail O'Neill

Rosario Scalise

Derick Seale

Victor Son

Stephen Tian

Emi Tran

Andrew E. Wang

Yilin Wu

Annie Xie

Jingyun Yang

Patrick Yin

Yunchu Zhang

Osbert Bastani

Glen Berseth

Jeannette Bohg

Ken Goldberg

Abhinav Gupta

Abhishek Gupta

Dinesh Jayaraman

Joseph J Lim

Jitendra Malik

Roberto Martín-Martín

Subramanian Ramamoorthy

Dorsa Sadigh

Shuran Song

Jiajun Wu

Michael C. Yip

Yuke Zhu

Thomas Kollar

Sergey Levine

Chelsea Finn

The creation of large, diverse, high-quality robot manipulation datasets is an important stepping stone on the path toward more capable and … (see more)robust robotic manipulation policies. However, creating such datasets is challenging: collecting robot manipulation data in diverse environments poses logistical and safety challenges and requires substantial investments in hardware and human labour. As a result, even the most general robot manipulation policies today are mostly trained on data collected in a small number of environments with limited scene and task diversity. In this work, we introduce DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset), a diverse robot manipulation dataset with 76k demonstration trajectories or 350 hours of interaction data, collected across 564 scenes and 84 tasks by 50 data collectors in North America, Asia, and Europe over the course of 12 months. We demonstrate that training with DROID leads to policies with higher performance and improved generalization ability. We open source the full dataset, policy learning code, and a detailed guide for reproducing our robot hardware setup.

2024-07-14

Robotics: Science and Systems XX (published)

doi.org

openreview.net

ConceptGraphs: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs for Perception and Planning

Qiao Gu

Alihusein Kuwajerwala

Sacha Morin

Krishna Murthy

Bipasha Sen

Aditya Agarwal

Corban Rivera

William Paul

Kirsty Ellis

Rama Chellappa

Chuang Gan

Celso M de Melo

Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Antonio Torralba

Florian Shkurti

Liam Paull

For robots to perform a wide variety of tasks, they require a 3D representation of the world that is semantically rich, yet compact and effi… (see more)cient for task-driven perception and planning. Recent approaches have attempted to leverage features from large vision-language models to encode semantics in 3D representations. However, these approaches tend to produce maps with per-point feature vectors, which do not scale well in larger environments, nor do they contain semantic spatial relationships between entities in the environment, which are useful for downstream planning. In this work, we propose ConceptGraphs, an open-vocabulary graph-structured representation for 3D scenes. ConceptGraphs is built by leveraging 2D foundation models and fusing their output to 3D by multi-view association. The resulting representations generalize to novel semantic classes, without the need to collect large 3D datasets or finetune models. We demonstrate the utility of this representation through a number of downstream planning tasks that are specified through abstract (language) prompts and require complex reasoning over spatial and semantic concepts. (Project page: https://concept-graphs.github.io/ Explainer video: https://youtu.be/mRhNkQwRYnc )

2024-05-12

2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (published)

doi.org

openreview.net

Venture Scientist Bootcamp

Mila Techaide 2026

AI Advantage: Productivity in Public Service

Kirsty Ellis

Publications

Venture Scientist Bootcamp

Mila Techaide 2026

AI Advantage: Productivity in Public Service

Popular keywords:

Kirsty Ellis

Publications