Renaud Detry

Researcher in robot learning & space robotics. Associate Professor at KU Leuven.

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inline_image I am an Associate Professor of robot learning at KU Leuven in Belgium, where I hold a dual appointment in electrical and mechanical engineering (groups PSI and RAM). I sit on the steering committee of Leuven.AI, I am a member of the ELLIS Society, and I am a technical advisor for OpalAI.

Formerly I was group lead for the Perception Systems group at inline_imageNASA JPL, Pasadena, CA, and an Assistant Professor at inline_imageUCLouvain, Belgium. I am a visiting researcher at ULiege and KTH.

My research interests include robot learning and computer vision, and their application to manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, on-orbit operations and planetary exploration. At JPL, I was machine-vision lead for the surface mission of the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return campaign (summarized in this invited lecture), and I worked on fun climbing robots such as the one shown in this video.

I am an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), and I regularly serve as associate editor for IROS and ICRA.

Office: 01.07 (at ESAT)
Post: Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 – box 2441
B–3001 Leuven
Belgium
e-mail:
Phone: +32 16 37 70 36
Students: email only please.
Web: Google Scholar, LinkedIn,
Twitter, KU Leuven, Leuven.AI
ORCID: 0000-0003-0597-1167

News

More announcements available on my LinkedIn feed.

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Selected Recent Publications

See my publication page for a complete list.

  1. Equivariant Volumetric Grasping.
    Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, Pengteng Li, and Renaud Detry.
    2025.
  2. Mini Diffuser: Fast Multi-task Diffusion Policy Training Using Two-level Mini-batches.
    Yutong Hu, Pinhao Song, Kehan Wen, and Renaud Detry.
    2025.
  3. AREPO: Uncertainty-Aware Robot Ensemble Learning Under Extreme Partial Observability.
    Yurui Du, Louis Hanut, Herman Bruyninckx, and Renaud Detry.
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025.
  4. Robotic Framework for Iterative and Adaptive Profile Grading of Sand.
    Louis Hanut, Yurui Du, Andrew Vande Moere, Renaud Detry, and Herman Bruyninckx.
    In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2025.
  5. Robotic Upcycling and Recycling: Unraveling the Era of Sustainable In-Space Manufacturing.
    Manu H. Nair, Mini C. Rai, Dirk Schaefer, Renaud Detry, Mithun Poozhiyil, Justyna Rybicka, Shan Dulanty, Josie Gotz, Maximo Roa, Roberto Lampariello, Shashank Govindaraj, and Jeremi Gancet.
    CEAS Space Journal, 2024.
  6. Implicit Grasp Diffusion: Bridging the Gap between Dense Prediction and Sampling-based Grasping.
    Pinhao Song, Pengteng Li, and Renaud Detry.
    In Conference on Robot Learning, 2024.

More publications →