Assistant professor, @Cornell_CS. Learning, perception, and control for building more dynamic robots.
Joined August 2019
- Tweets 35
- Following 132
- Followers 361
- Likes 65
5 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
10 Oct 2024
I'm so excited to announce I will be joining @Cornell_CS as an assistant professor next fall!
I can't wait to launch my lab and start building robots with human-level dexterity and adaptability. 🤖🏃🤹
ALT Preston sitting at a table with two robots, signing their offer letter from @Cornell_CS.
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14 Oct 2025
So cool to see the loco-manipulation stack we developed at RAI out in the wild! Congrats to @simonlc_ and the team for the awesome demo.
This ability to adapt RL policies using test-time reward spec MPC/search is really cool / basically why we built judo.
14 Oct 2025
See Spot perform dynamic whole-body manipulation. Using a combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and sampling-based control, the robot is able to autonomously drag, roll, and stack tires weighing 15 kg (33 lb), well above its maximum arm lift capacity.
Learn more about coordinating locomotion and manipulation processes: rai-inst.com/resources/blog/…
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14 Oct 2025
If you haven't already, you should check out judo, the MPC package underlying a lot of the skills here (including the tire flip-up!!) - we're excited to see what other cool ideas people can cook up
github.com/bdaiinstitute/jud…
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Preston Culbertson retweeted
11 Oct 2025
Thank you everyone for an amazing event! Looking forward to next year's NERC at Princeton! #NERC2025
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Preston Culbertson retweeted
24 Sep 2025
Just over one week until registration closes for NERC! Register by next Friday, Oct 3, to join us in Ithaca next month.
🎟️events.ces.scl.cornell.edu/e…
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Preston Culbertson retweeted
12 Sep 2025
Just one month until NERC 2025!
Come to Cornell on Oct 11 for a full day of cutting-edge robotics research and community.
📍 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
🗓️ Oct 11, 2025
🎟️ Register by Oct 11: events.ces.scl.cornell.edu/e…
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Preston Culbertson retweeted
2 Sep 2025
Update: Due to an OpenReview outage, the NERC submission deadline will be extended by one day, to tomorrow, Wed Sep 3 at 11:59pm ET.
Looking forward to reviewing your submissions!
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26 Aug 2025
Join us in Ithaca this October for NERC!
Submissions are due this Tuesday, Sept 2 - excited to see everyone at Cornell in a few weeks.
26 Aug 2025
Reminder: Poster and Rising Star submissions for NERC 2025 are due next Tuesday, Sep 2!
Submit now for a great opportunity to share your research with robotics faculty and peers.
🔗 openreview.net/group?id=NERC…
📅 Deadline: Sep 2
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27 Jun 2025
🥋 We're excited to share judo: a hackable toolbox for sampling-based MPC (SMPC), data collection, and more, designed to make it easier to experiment with high-performance control.
Try it: pip install judo-rai
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27 Jun 2025
There’s more to come:
⚡ GPU-accelerated sim (via mujoco_warp)
🦾 New tasks: locomotion, dexterous manipulation
🧠 Hooks for adding learning-based components
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27 Jun 2025
judo is still early days, but we hope it lowers the barrier to SMPC and sparks new directions in control and robot learning.
Try it here 👉 github.com/bdaiinstitute/jud…
or: pip install judo-rai
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9 Nov 2024
Congrats to @albert_h_li for winning Outstanding Paper today at the CoRL workshop for learning fine dexterous manipulation!
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7 Nov 2024
ICYMI: For #CoRL2024 we released a dataset of 3.5M (!) dexterous grasps, with multi-trial labels and perceptual data for 4.3k objects.
Our takeaways: scale matters, and refining grasps > better sampling. Hoping our data can enable more vision-based grasps in hardware!
4 Nov 2024
There have been many recent big grasping datasets, but few demos of real-world grasping using generative models. How do we achieve this?
Introducing: Get a Grip (#corl2024)!
We show that instead of generative models, discriminative models can attain sim2real transfer!
👀🧵👇
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10 Oct 2024
Check out our new work doing cube rotation in hardware with mujoco vanilla CEM! (no RL needed 👀)
Really excited about the success we've been seeing with online search / sampling-based MPC for contact-rich manipulation.
For more details check out @albert_h_li 's thread 👇
10 Oct 2024
Excited to share our new📰, DROP: Dexterous Reorientation via Online Planning!
Overview:
🔹We tackle cube rotation🧊♻️on hardware
🔹DROP is the first 🧊♻️sampling-based MPC demo. No reinforcement learning!
🔹Median 30.5 rotations w/o dropping, max of 81👑🦾
See 🧵below👇
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10 Oct 2024
🖥️ Project website: caltech-amber.github.io/drop…
📰 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2409.14562
🛠️ Code and (soon) replicable hardware setup: github.com/Caltech-AMBER/dro…
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