Renaud Detry

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_image NASA JPL, Pasadena, CA, and an Assistant Professor at UCLouvain, 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.

Mar 27, 2025	New paper on uncertainty-aware RL, to appear in RA-L.
Mar 07, 2025	New paper on robotic sand grading, to appear at ICRA 2025! 🏗️✨
Sep 30, 2024	New paper accepted at CoRL 2024! 🚀🤖
Sep 21, 2024	I presented our recent work on assistive robotics at the Human-Centered AI Conference 2024 in Malibu, CA.
Sep 19, 2024	I presented our recent work hand trajectory prediction for shared control and assistive robotics at the Learning in Control & Robotics workshop at RWTH Aachen.
Mar 13, 2024	Presenting result of our RoBétArmé project at the AI and Robotics in Construction workshop at ERF 2024.
Mar 06, 2024	Freshly rebuilt this page using the wonderful al-folio.
Apr 13, 2022	Co-edited this Frontiers in Robotics and AI special issue on Robotic In-Situ Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing.
Apr 07, 2022	Presenting our work on Autonomous robot manipulation for planetary exploration at the CIRP Conference on Assembly Technology And Systems (CATS 2022), Leuven, Belgium.
Jan 23, 2022	Happily served on the Ph.D. committee of Ali Varamesh at KU Leuven.

Older news →

Selected Recent Publications

See my publication page for a complete list.

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.

Bib

DOI

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@article{du2025a,
  author = {Du, Yurui and Hanut, Louis and Bruyninckx, Herman and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {AREPO: Uncertainty-Aware Robot Ensemble Learning Under Extreme Partial Observability},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2025.3554451},
  journal = {{IEEE} Robotics and Automation Letters},
}

Robotic Framework for Iterative and Adaptive Profile Grading of Sand.

Louis Hanut, Yurui Du, Renaud Detry, and Herman Bruyninckx.

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2025.

Bib

PDF

@inproceedings{hanut2025a,
  author = {Hanut, Louis and Du, Yurui and Detry, Renaud and Bruyninckx, Herman},
  title = {Robotic Framework for Iterative and Adaptive Profile Grading of Sand},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {{IEEE} International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
}

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.

Bib

DOI

@article{nair2024a,
  author = {Nair, Manu H. and Rai, Mini C. and Schaefer, Dirk and Detry, Renaud and Poozhiyil, Mithun and Rybicka, Justyna and Dulanty, Shan and Gotz, Josie and Roa, Maximo and Lampariello, Roberto and Govindaraj, Shashank and Gancet, Jeremi},
  title = {Robotic Upcycling and Recycling: Unraveling the Era of Sustainable In-Space Manufacturing},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.1007/s12567-024-00576-6},
  journal = {CEAS Space Journal},
}

Robot Trajectron: Trajectory Prediction-based Shared Control for Robot Manipulation.

Pinhao Song, Pengteng Li, Erwin Aertbelien, and Renaud Detry.

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2024.

Bib

DOI

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@inproceedings{song2024a,
  author = {Song, Pinhao and Li, Pengteng and Aertbelien, Erwin and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Robot Trajectron: Trajectory Prediction-based Shared Control for Robot Manipulation},
  year = {2024},
  booktitle = {{IEEE} International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10611507},
}

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.

Bib

PDF

@inproceedings{song2024b,
  author = {Song, Pinhao and Li, Pengteng and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Implicit Grasp Diffusion: Bridging the Gap between Dense Prediction and Sampling-based Grasping},
  year = {2024},
  booktitle = {Conference on Robot Learning},
}

End-to-end Neural Estimation of Spacecraft Pose with Intermediate Detection of Keypoints.

Antoine Legrand, Renaud Detry, and Christophe De Vleeschouwer.

In Computer Vision – ECCV 2022 Workshops, 2023 (Best presentation award).

Bib

DOI

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@inproceedings{legrand2023a,
  author = {Legrand, Antoine and Detry, Renaud and De Vleeschouwer, Christophe},
  title = {End-to-end Neural Estimation of Spacecraft Pose with Intermediate Detection of Keypoints},
  year = {2023},
  booktitle = {Computer Vision -- ECCV 2022 Workshops},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-25056-9_11},
  pages = {154--169},
}

More publications →