Bernadette Bucher

Bernadette Bucher

About

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Robotics Department at University of Michigan starting Fall 2024.

I am currently a research scientist at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute and a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Michigan.

My research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. The focus of my current research is on building mobile manipulators which can reliably operate in novel and dynamic environments.

  • For University of Michigan related inquiries, please contact me at bucherb@umich.edu.
  • For Boston Dynamics AI Institute related inquiries, please reach out via LinkedIn.
  • For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar.
  • 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. During my PhD, I interned in the Seattle Robotics Lab at NVIDIA Research. Prior to starting my PhD, I was a Senior Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin Corporation where I worked from 2014 to 2019. 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.

    Publications

    VLFM

    Naoki Yokoyama, Sehoon Ha, Dhruv Batra, Jiuguang Wang, Bernadette Bucher.
    VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation.
    ICRA, 2024.
    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

    Workshop Papers and Preprints

    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.
    CoRL Workshop Towards Reliable and Deployable Learning-based Robotic Systems, 2023.

    arXiv / project page / bibtex

    Bo Wu, Bruce Lee, Bernadette Bucher, Nikolai Matni.
    Uncertainty Aware Deployment of Pre-trained Task Conditioned Imitation Learning Policies.
    CoRL Workshop on Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Robotics Towards Reliable Learning-Based Autonomy, 2023.

    paper / bibtex

    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.

    paper / bibtex

    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.

    paper / bibtex

    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.

    paper / bibtex

    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.

    paper / bibtex