Pieter Abbeel

He received a BS/MS in Electrical Engineering from KU Leuven (Belgium) and received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008. He joined UC Berkeley IEOR faculty in 2017, as a joint professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He joined the His research focuses on robotics, machine learning and control.

Professor Abbeel has won various awards, including the Sloan Research Fellowship, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program (AFOSR-YIP) award, the Okawa Research Grant, the 2011 TR35, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Early Career Award, and the Dick Volz Best U.S. Ph.D. Thesis in Robotics and Automation Award. He has developed apprenticeship learning algorithms which have enabled advanced helicopter aerobatics, including maneuvers such as tic-tocs, chaos and auto-rotation, which only exceptional human pilots can perform. His group has also enabled a robot to reliably pick up randomly shaped, crumpled pieces of laundry and fold them. His work has been featured in many popular press outlets, including BBC, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Discovery Channel, SmartPlanet and Wired.

• His research focuses on robotics, machine learning and control.

• S. Krishnan, A. Garg, S. Patil, C. Lea, G. Hager, P. Abbeel, and K. Goldberg, "Transition State Clustering: Unsupervised Surgical Trajectory Segmentation For Robot Learning," in International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), 2015.
• S. McKinley, A. Garg, S. Sen, R. Kapadia, A. Murali, K. Nichols, S. Lim, S. Patil, P. Abbeel, A. M. Okamura, and K. Goldberg, "A Disposable Haptic Palpation Probe for Locating Subcutaneous Blood Vessels in Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery," in IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2015.
• M. Laskey, J. Mahler, Z. McCarthy, F. T. Pokorny, S. Patil, J. Van Den Berg, D. Kragic, P. Abbeel, and K. Goldberg, "Multi-Arm Bandit Models for 2D Sample Based Grasp Planning with Uncertainty," in IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2015.
• B. Charrow, G. Kahn, S. Patil, S. Liu, K. Goldberg, P. Abbeel, N. Michael, and V. Kumar, "Information-Theoretic Planning with Trajectory Optimization for Dense 3D Mapping," in Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Conference, 2015.
• A. Murali, S. Sen, B. Kehoe, A. Garg, S. McFarland, S. Patil, W. D. Boyd, S. Lim, P. Abbeel, and K. Goldberg, "Learning by Observation for Surgical Subtasks: Multilateral Cutting of 3D Viscoelastic and 2D Orthotropic Tissue Phantoms," 2015.
• J. Mahler, S. Patil, B. Kehoe, J. Van Den Berg, M. Ciocarlie, P. Abbeel, and K. Goldberg, "GP-GPIS-OPT: Grasp Planning Under Shape Uncertainty Using Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces and Sequential Convex Programming," in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2015.
• B. Kehoe, S. Patil, P. Abbeel, and K. Goldberg, "A Survey of Research on Cloud Robotics and Automation," IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering: Special Issue on Cloud Robotics and Automation, vol. 12, no. 2, April 2015.
• J. van den Berg, P. Abbeel, and K. Goldberg, "LQG-MP: Optimized Path Planning for Robots with Motion Uncertainty and Imperfect State Information," in Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2010.
• P. Abbeel, A. Coates, and A. Y. Ng, "Autonomous Helicopter Aerobatics through Apprenticeship Learning," International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), June 2010.
• J. Maitin-Shepard, M. Cusumano-Towner, J. Lei, and P. Abbeel, "Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding," in Proceedings 2010 Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010.
• J. Tang, A. Singh, N. Goehausen, and P. Abbeel, "Learning Parameterized Maneuvers for Autonomous Helicopter Flight," in Proceedings 2010 Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010.
• J. van den Berg, S. Miller, D. Duckworth, H. Hu, X. Fu, K. Goldberg, and P. Abbeel, "Superhuman Performance of Surgical Tasks by Robots using Iterative Learning from Human-Guided Demonstrations (Best Medical Robotics Paper Award)," in Proceedings 2010 Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010.
• P. J. From, J. T. Gravdahl, and P. Abbeel, "On the Influence of Ship Motion Prediction Accuracy on Motion Planning and Control of Robotic Manipulators on Seaborne Platforms," in Proceedings 2010 Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2010.
• S. Gleason, M. Quigley, and P. Abbeel, "An Open Source AGPS/DGPS Capable C-coded Software Receiver," in Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of The Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009), 2009, pp. 1926 - 1931.
• S. Gleason, M. Quigley, and P. Abbeel, "A GPS Software Receiver," in GNSS: Applications and Methods, GNSS Technology and Applications Series, Artech House, 2009, pp. 121-148.
• A. Coates, P. Abbeel, and A. Y. Ng, "Apprenticeship Learning for Helicopter Control," Communications of the ACM, July 2009.