Julius Jankowski I'm a PhD student at EPFL and a researcher at the Idiap Research Institute, Robot Learning and Interaction Group.

My work focuses on algorithms that enable robots to autonomously interact with their environment through contacts. In particular, I like to think about how model-predictive control frameworks can benefit from the explorative nature of sampling-based optimization. I am also interested in how contact dynamics should be modeled for efficient reasoning. Along that line, I am currently working on a probabilistic model of contact dynamics that allows a robot to reason about the uncertainty in its interactions with the environment. A robot equipped with the concept of uncertain contact dynamics chooses, for example, to push objects with two fingers instead of one to reduce uncertainty about the object's pose, as shown in the video below. For an overview over my projects, please visit Projects.