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 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_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.

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.

Jun 30, 2026	New IROS paper: Task-Aware Shared Control for Teleoperated Manipulation!
Apr 27, 2026	New RSS paper: Multimodal planning and adaptive l-return stabilizes deep imagination in long-horizon visual MPC!
Apr 27, 2026	New RSS paper: AR-VLA is an autoregressive action expert that boosts the temporal consistency of VLAs and diffusion policies!
Feb 10, 2026	Exciting week + talk at the ROMANDIC winter school!
Nov 19, 2025	ELLIIT Focus Period in Lund
Oct 20, 2025	Two IROS WS invited talks: Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation in Changing Environments, and Learning, Planning, and Reasoning in Dynamic Environments
Sep 24, 2025	New paper: Reevaluating CNNs for Spectral Analysis – A Focus on Raman Spectroscopy
Aug 27, 2025	Talk on equivariance, diffusion and RL at UCLA
Aug 20, 2025	Giving a talk at the Generative Physical AI at CASE 2025 tomorrow morning
Aug 05, 2025	New paper: Grasp model designed for rotation equivariance == greatly improved sample efficiency 🌀

Older news →

Selected Recent Publications

See my publication page for a complete list.

IJRR

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.

arXiv

Bib

PDF

@article{song2025b,
  author = {Song, Pinhao and Du, Yurui and Saussus, Ophelie and Schrijver, Sofie De and Caprara, Irene and Janssen, Peter and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Robot Trajectron V2: A Probabilistic Shared Control Framework for Navigation},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  journal = {International Journal of Robotics Research},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19954}
}

RSS

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.

@inproceedings{hu2026a,
  author = {Hu, Yutong and Zaech, Jan-Nico and Nikolov, Nikolay and Yao, Yuanqi and Dey, Sombit and Albanese, Giuliano and Detry, Renaud and Gool, Luc Van and Paudel, Danda},
  title = {AR-VLA: True Autoregressive Action Expert for Vision-Language-Action Models},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10126}
}

RSS

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.

@inproceedings{du2026a,
  author = {Du, Yurui and Song, Pinhao and Hu, Yutong and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {ELVIS: Ensemble-Calibrated Latent Imagination for Long-Horizon Visual MPC},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  booktitle = {Robotics: Science and Systems},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04709}
}

IROS

TASC: Task-Aware Shared Control for Teleoperated Manipulation.

Ze Fu, Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, and Renaud Detry.

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2026.

@inproceedings{fu2025a,
  author = {Fu, Ze and Song, Pinhao and Hu, Yutong and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {TASC: Task-Aware Shared Control for Teleoperated Manipulation},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  booktitle = {{IEEE/RSJ} International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10416}
}

Equivariant Volumetric Grasping.

Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, Pengteng Li, and Renaud Detry.

2025.

@misc{song2025a,
  author = {Song, Pinhao and Hu, Yutong and Li, Pengteng and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Equivariant Volumetric Grasping},
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  howpublished = {arXiv:2507.18847 [cs.RO]},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18847}
}

RA-L

Mini Diffuser: Fast Multi-task Diffusion Policy Training Using Two-level Mini-batches.

Yutong Hu, Pinhao Song, Kehan Wen, and Renaud Detry.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025.

@article{hu2025a,
  author = {Hu, Yutong and Song, Pinhao and Wen, Kehan and Detry, Renaud},
  title = {Mini Diffuser: Fast Multi-task Diffusion Policy Training Using Two-level Mini-batches},
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2025.3632751},
  journal = {{IEEE} Robotics and Automation Letters},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09430},
}

More publications →