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 am a member of the IEEE Science and Technology Watch Board, 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. I am an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) and IEEE Transactions on Robot Learning (T-RL), and I regularly serve as associate editor for IROS and ICRA.

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.

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.

Older news →

Selected Recent Publications

See my publication page for a complete list.

  1. CoRL 2026
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    FOCI Policy: Focus on Object-Centric Interactions for Relational Manipulation Policies.
    Ze Fu, Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, and Renaud Detry.
    In Conference on Robot Learning, 2026.
  2. RA-M 2026
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    Surviving the Paper Deluge: A One-Year Study in Learning From Demonstration.
    Aude Billard, Renaud Detry, Nadia Figueroa, Maximilian Foriest, Dongheui Lee, and Kunpeng Yao.
    IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2026.
  3. IJRR 2026
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    Robot Trajectron V2: A Probabilistic Shared Control Framework for Navigation.
    Pinhao Song, Yurui Du, Ophelie Saussus, Sofie De Schrijver, Irene Caprara, Peter Janssen, and Renaud Detry.
    International Journal of Robotics Research, 2026.
  4. RSS 2026
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    AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models.
    Yutong Hu, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Yuanqi Yao, Sombit Dey, Giuliano Albanese, Renaud Detry, Luc Van Gool, and Danda Paudel.
    In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2026.
  5. RSS 2026
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    ELVIS: Ensemble-Calibrated Latent Imagination for Long-Horizon Visual MPC.
    Yurui Du, Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, and Renaud Detry.
    In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2026.

More publications →