Florian T. Pokorny

Associate Professor of Machine Learning, RPL, EECS, KTH

Welcome

My group's research focusses on data-driven methods for robotic manipulation. Our recent interests include the understanding of training data requirements and transfer learning for training machine learning methods for robotic manipulation at scale and challenges in applying cloud robotics as a paradigm for robotic manipulation. Our work utilizes both state of the art deep learning and data-driven geometric and topological methods for reasoning about robot-object interactions, ranging from studying foundational data-driven robot manipulation primitives to complex interaction scenarios where objects are deformable or fragile.

I currently coordinate two research projects along this research focus. The Horizon Europe project SoftEnable, and the WASP funded Swedish excellent research environment (NEST) grant "Intelligent Cloud Robotics for Real-Time Manipulation at Scale". My group furthermore is funded by additional grants from WASP as well as the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

Short Biography

I am currently an Associate Professor of Machine Learning within the division of Robotics, Perception and Learning at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. I spent 05/2015-04/2016 at the University of California, Berkeley working in Prof. Ken Goldberg's group and previously was also a researcher and postdoc with Prof. Danica Kragic's group at KTH. Before that, I obtained my PhD in mathematics under supervision of Prof. Michael Singer at the University of Edinburgh. I hold a BSc mathematics from the University of Edinburgh and a Master of Advanced Study in Mathematics (Part III) from the University of Cambridge.

Contact

Room 713, Teknikringen 14 RPL, EECS, KTH, 114 28 Stockholm, Sweden, fpokorny (at) kth.se

News

My group is actively looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join us - please reach out if you are interested. A job announcement will be published shortly.

Research Group

Current Group Members

Robert Gieselmann

PhD Student, started 02/2019

Previously: Technical University of Munich, Germany

website

Muhammad Zahid

Research Engineer, started 03/2021

Previously: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Shutong Jin

PhD student, started 11/2022

Previously: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

website

Yifei Dong

PhD student, started 12/2022

Previously: ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Ruiyu Wang

PhD student, started 03/2023

Previously: National University of Singapore, Singapore

website

Rafael Cabral

PhD student, to start 08/2023

Previously: Technical University of Munich, Germany

Incoming WASP-HS Postdoc

Postdoc, to start 2023

Current Students - Co-Supervision

Rita Laezza

PhD Student (Chalmers), main supervisor: Yiannis Karayiannidis, started 02/2019

Deformable Object Manipulation

website

Previous Visitors and (Co-)supervised PhD students

Other past group group members

Master Degree Projects

I am currently looking for master students interested in large scale robotic manipulation and cloud robotics. If you are interested, please drop me an email with your CV and transcripts attached as well as a reason for why you are interested in this topic. There are opportunities to work on hardware, machine learning, perception and motion planning. You can also consider the course DD2411 to work on a project in this direction and get credits. Please note that I only have capacity to consider students that are already registered at KTH for thesis project work.

Publications

See also google scholar

Preprints

CloudGripper: An Open Source Cloud Robotics Testbed for Robotic Manipulation Research, Benchmarking and Data Collection at Scale

Muhammad Zahid, Florian T. Pokorny

under review

ArXiV preprint

2023

Expansive Latent Planning for Sparse Reward Offline Reinforcement Learning

Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny

to appear, Conference on Robot Learning (CORL), 2023 (oral presentation, 6.6% acceptance ratio)

preprint

Soft Fixtures: Towards Practical Caging-Based Manipulation of Rigid and Deformable Ojbects

Yifei Dong, Florian T. Pokorny

to appear, 3rd Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects, IEEE ICRA 2023.

An Efficient and Continuous Voronoi Density Estimator

Giovanni Luca Marchetti, Vladislav Polianskii, Anastasiia Varava, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

Preprint, to appear, AISTATS 2022 (29% acceptance ratio)

29% acceptance ratio and selected for oral presentation (6.5% of accepted papers, 32 of 496 accepted)

2022

Latent Planning via Expansive Tree Search

Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny

Preprint, NeurIPS 2022

BITKOMO: Combining Sampling and Optimization for Fast Convergence in Optimal Motion Planning

Jay Kamat, Joaquim Ortiz-Haro, Marc Toussaint, Florian T. Pokorny, Andreas Orthey

ArXiv IEEE/RSJ IROS

Active Nearest Neighbor Regression Through Delaunay Refinement

Giovanni Luca Marchetti*, Vladislav Polianskii*, Anastasia Varava, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

ICML 2022

Voronoi Density Estimator for High-Dimensional Data: Computation, Compactification and Convergence

Giovanni Luca Marchetti*, Vladislav Polianskii*, Alexander Kravberg, Anastasia Varava, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

UAI 2022

Delaunay Component Analysis for Evaluation of Data Representations

Petra Poklukar, Vladislav Polianskii, Anastasia Varava, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

Intenational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022

pdf

2021

Expansive Latent Space Trees for Planning from Visual Inputs

Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny

Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning - Theory and Practice, NeurIPS 2021

pdf

DLO@Scale - A Large-Scale Meta Dataset for Learning Non-Rigid Object Pushing Dynamics

Robert Gieselmann, Alberta Longhini, Alfredo Reichlin, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

Workshop on Physical Reasoning and Inductive Biases for the Real World, NeurIPS 2021

pdf, dataset and website

Learning node representations using stationary flow prediction on large payment and cash transaction networks

Ciwan Ceylan, Salla Franzén, Florian T. Pokorny

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2021, conference presentation link

Presenting ReForm, a Robot Learning Sandbox for Deformable Linear Object Manipulation

Rita Laezza, Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny, Yiannis Karayiannidis

Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects, IEEE ICRA 2021

pdf video

Planning-Augmented Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (Volume 6, Issue 3, July 2021

pdf

ReForm: A Robot Learning Sandbox for Deformable Linear Object Manipulation

Rita Laezza, Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny, Yiannis Karayiannidis

IEEE ICRA, 2021

Herding by Caging: A Formation-based Motion Planning Framework for Guiding Mobile Agents

Haoran Song, Anastasiia Varava, Oleksandr Kravchenko, Danica Kragic, Michael Yu Wang, Florian T. Pokorny, Kaiyu Hang

Autonomous Robots, 2021, pdf

Partial caging: a clearance-based definition, datasets, and deep learning

Michael C Welle, Anastasiia Varava, Jeff Mahler, Ken Goldberg, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

Autonomous Robots, 2021

pdf

2020

Standard Deep Generative Models for Density Estimation in Configuration Spaces: A Study of Benefits, Limits and Challenges

Robert Gieselmann, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE IROS 2020

preprint pdf

No Map, No Problem: A Local Sensing Approach for Navigation in Human-Made Spaces Using Signs

Claire Liang, Ross A. Knepper, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE IROS 2020

preprint pdf

Voronoi Graph Traversal in High Dimensions with Applications to Topological Data Analysis and Piecewise Linear Interpolation

Vladislav Polianskii, Florian T. Pokorny

KDD 2020

pdf

Geometric Characterization of Two-Finger Basket Grasps of 2-D Objects: Contact Space Formulation

Elon D. Rimon, Florian T. Pokorny, Weiwei Wan

ICRA 2020

preprint pdf

Free Space of Rigid Objects: Caging, Path Non-Existence, and Narrow Passage Detection

Anastasiia Varava, Joao Carvalho, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

IJRR 2020

preprint pdf

A Robotics-Inspired Screening Algorithm for Molecular Caging Prediction

Oleksandr Kravchenko*, Anastasiia Varava, Florian T. Pokorny, Didier Devaurs, Lydia E. Kavraki*, and Danica Kragic*

Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling 2020

pdf,

2019

Long-term Prediction of Motion Trajectories Using Path Homology Clusters

J. Frederico Carvalho, Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

IEEE IROS 2019

pdf,

Partial Caging: A Clearance-Based Definition and Deep Learning

Anastasiia Varava*, Michael Welle*, Jeffrey Mahler, Ken Goldberg, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE IROS 2019

pdf,

Voronoi Classification: A High-Dimensional Geometric Approach via Weighted Monte Carlo Integration over Voronoi Boundaries

Vladislav Polianskii, Florian T. Pokorny

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2019

pdf, appendix

2018

Free Space of Rigid Objects: Caging, Path Non-Existence, and Narrow Passage Detection

Anastasiia Varava, J. Frederico Carvalho, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) 2018

pdf, appendix

Synthesis of Energy-Bounded Planar Caging Grasps using Persistent Homology

Jeffrey Mahler, Florian T. Pokorny, Sherdil Niyaz, Ken Goldberg

IEEE Transactions on Automation Science. Volume 15, Issue 3. 2018

pdf, website

Path Clustering with Homology Area

J. Frederico Carvalho, Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE ICRA 2018

pdf

SWIRL: A sequential windowed inverse reinforcement learning algorithm for robot tasks with delayed rewards

Sanjay Krishnan, Animesh Garg, Richard Liaw, Lauren Miller, Florian T. Pokorny, Ken Goldberg

The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR). Volume 37. Issue 9. July, 2018

pdf

An algorithm for calculating top-dimensional bounding chains

J. Frederico Carvalho, Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

PeerJ Computer Science

pdf

2017

Caging and Path Non-Existence: a Deterministic Sampling-Based Verification Algorithm

Anastasiia Varava, J. Frederico Carvalho, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

International Symposium on Robotics Research, 2017

pdf

Caging Grasp Synthesis and Verification for Partially Deformable 3D Objects with Narrow Parts

Anastasiia Varava, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE IROS (Abstract Only), 2017

Multi-scale Activity Estimation with Spatial Abstractions

Majd Hawasly, Florian T. Pokorny, Subramanian Ramamoorthy

Geometric Science of Information, 2017

pdf

Herding by Caging: a Topological Approach towards Guiding Moving Agents via Mobile Robots

Anastasiia Varava, Kaiyu Hang, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, 2017

pdf

CapriDB - Capture, Print, Innovate: A Low-Cost Pipeline and Database for Reproducible Manipulation Research

Florian T. Pokorny, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Karl Pauwels, Judith Bütepage, Clara Scherer, Danica Kragic

Data in Brief, Volume 11, April 2017, Pages 491-498

pdf

2016

Large-Scale Supervised Learning of the Grasp Robustness of Surface Patch Pairs

Daniel Seita, Florian T. Pokorny, Jeffrey Mahler, Danica Kragic, Michael Franklin, John Canny, Ken Goldberg

IEEE SIMPAR, 2016

pdf

Synthesis of Energy-Bounded Planar Caging Grasps using Persistent Homology

Jeffrey Mahler*, Florian T. Pokorny*, Sherdil Niyaz, Ken Goldberg

WAFR, 2016

pdf

SWIRL: A Sequential Windowed Inverse Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Robot Tasks With Delayed Rewards

Sanjay Krishnan, Animesh Garg, Richard Liaw, Brijen Thananjeyan, Lauren Miller, Florian T. Pokorny, Ken Goldberg

WAFR, 2016

pdf

Caging Grasps of Rigid and Partially Deformable 3D Objects with Double Fork and Neck Features

Anastasiia Varava, Danica Kragic, Florian T. Pokorny

IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2016

pdf

Hierarchical Fingertip Space: A Unified Framework for Grasp Planning and In-Hand Grasp Adaptation

Kaiyu Hang, Miao Li, Johannes A. Stork, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Florian T. Pokorny, Aude Billard, Danica Kragic

IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2016

pdf

Privacy-Preserving Cloud-Based Grasp Planning

Jeffrey Mahler, Brian Hou, Sherdil Niyaz, Florian T Pokorny, Ramu Chandra, Ken Goldberg

IEEE CASE, 2016, Finalist, Best Student Paper Award, CASE 2016

pdf

Robot Grasping in Clutter: Using a Hierarchy of Supervisors for Learning from Demonstrations

Michael Laskey, Jonathan Lee, Caleb Chuck, David Gealy, Wesley Hsieh, Florian T Pokorny, Anca D Dragan, Ken Goldberg

IEEE CASE, 2016

pdf

High-Dimensional Winding-Augmented Motion Planning with 2D Topological Task Projections and Persistent Homology

Florian T Pokorny, Danica Kragic, Lydia E Kavraki, Ken Goldberg

IEEE ICRA, 2016

pdf

Topological Trajectory Clustering with Relative Persistent Homology

Florian T Pokorny, Ken Goldberg, Danica Kragic

IEEE ICRA, 2016

pdf

Dex-Net 1.0: A Cloud-Based Network of 3D Objects and a Multi-Armed Bandit Model with Correlated Rewards to Accelerate Robust Grasp Planning

Jeffrey Mahler, Florian T. Pokorny, Brian Hou, Melrose Roderick, Michael Laskey, Mathieu Aubry, Kai Kohlhoff, Torsten Kroeger, James Kuffner, Ken Goldberg

IEEE ICRA, 2016, Finalist, Best Manipulation Paper Award, ICRA 2016

pdf

CapriDB - Capture, Print, Innovate: A Low-Cost Pipeline and Database for Reproducible Manipulation Research

Florian T. Pokorny, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Karl Pauwels, Judith Bütepage, Clara Scherer, Danica Kragic

Workshop on Grasping and Manipulation Datasets, IEEE ICRA, 2016

See the 2017 Data in Brief Journal publication for details

Energy-Bounded Caging: Formal Definition and 2D Lower Bound Algorithm Based on Weighted Alpha Shapes

Jeffrey Mahler, Florian T. Pokorny, A. Frank van der Stappen, Ken Goldberg

IEEE RA-Letters, 2016

pdf

SHIV: Reducing Supervisor Burden using Support Vectors to Efficiently Learn Robot Control Policies from Demonstrations

Michael Laskey, Sam Stazak, Wesley Yu-Shu Hsieh, Florian T. Pokorny, Anca D. Dragan, Ken Goldberg

IEEE ICRA, 2016, Finalist, Best HRI Paper Award, ICRA 2016

pdf

TSC-DL: Unsupervised Segmentation of Surgical Demonstrations with Deep Learning

Adithyavairavan Murali, Animesh Garg, Sanjay Krishnan, Florian T. Pokorny, Pieter Abbeel, Trevor Darrell, Ken Goldberg

IEEE ICRA, 2016

pdf

Topological Trajectory Classification with Filtrations of Simplicial Complexes and Persistent Homology

Florian T. Pokorny, Majd Hawasly, Subramanian Ramamoorthy

International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2016

pdf

2015

On Visual Feature Representations for Transition State Learning in Robotic Task Demonstrations

Animesh Garg*, Sanjay Krishnan*, Adithyavairavan Murali, Florian T. Pokorny, Pieter Abbeel, Trevor Darrell, Ken Goldberg

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28, Workshop on Feature Extraction: Modern Questions and Challenges, 2015

pdf

Data-Driven Topological Motion Planning with Persistent Cohomology

Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, 2015

pdf

Multi-Armed Bandit Models for 2D Grasp Planning with Uncertainty

Michael Laskey, Jeff Mahler, Zoe McCarthy, Florian T. Pokorny, Sachin Patil, Jur van den Berg, Danica Kragic, Pieter Abbeel, Ken Goldberg

Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2015

pdf

On a Family of Decomposable Kernels on Sequences

Andrea Baisero, Florian T. Pokorny, Carl Henrik Ek

arXiv, 2015

pdf

The Path Kernel: A Novel Kernel for Sequential Data

Andrea Baisero, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic, Carl Henrik Ek

Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, 2015, pp. 71-84

pdf

Cohomological learning of periodic motion

Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Florian T. Pokorny, Primoz Skraba, Danica Kragic

Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing, 2015, pp. 1-22

pdf, video

2014

Grasp Moduli Spaces, Gaussian Processes, and Multimodal Sensor Data

Florian T. Pokorny, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Johannes Exner, Mårten Björkman, Danica Kragic

Workshop on Information-based Grasp and Manipulation Planning, Robotics: Science and Systems, 2014

pdf, video

Multiscale Topological Trajectory Classification with Persistent Homology

Florian T. Pokorny, Majd Hawasly, Subramanian Ramamoorthy

Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, 2014

Selected for a 20 min oral presentation at RSS (1 of 6 such presentations)

pdf

Grasp Moduli Spaces and Spherical Harmonics

Florian T. Pokorny, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Danica Kragic

Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2014

pdf, video, code

Combinatorial Optimization for Hierarchical Contact-level Grasping

Kaiyu Hang, Johannes A. Stork, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2014

Finalist, Best Student Paper Award, ICRA 2014

pdf

2013

Supervised Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes with Variational Inference

Cheng Zhang, Carl Henrik Ek, Xavi Gratal, Florian T. Pokorny, Hedvig Kjellström

IEEE ICCV Workshop on Inference for Probabilistic Graphical Models, 2013

pdf

Toric partial density functions and stability of toric varieties

Florian T. Pokorny, Michael Singer

Mathematische Annalen, 2013

pdf

A Topology-based Object Representation for Clasping, Latching and Hooking

Johannes A. Stork, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (HUMANOIDS), 2013

Finalist, Best Conference Paper Award, HUMANOIDS 2013

pdf

Classical Grasp Quality Evaluation: New Theory and Algorithms

Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013

pdf, code

Caging Complex Objects with Geodesic Balls

Dmitry Zarubin, Florian T. Pokorny, Marc Toussaint, Danica Kragic

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013

pdf

Integrated Motion and Clasp Planning with Virtual Linking

Johannes A. Stork, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013

pdf

Friction Coefficients and Grasp Synthesis

Kaiyu Hang, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2013

pdf

Grasp Moduli Spaces

Florian T. Pokorny, Kaiyu Hang, Danica Kragic

Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems, 2013

pdf, video

Towards Postural Synergies for Caging Grasps

Johannes A. Stork, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic

Hand Synergies - how to tame the complexity of grapsing, Workshop, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013

pdf

Topological Synergies for Grasp Transfer

Dmitry Zarubin, Florian T. Pokorny, Dan Song, Marc Toussaint, Danica Kragic

Hand Synergies - how to tame the complexity of grapsing, Workshop, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013

pdf

Grasping Objects with Holes: A Topological Approach

Florian T. Pokorny, Johannes A. Stork, Danica Kragic

Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013

pdf

The Path Kernel

Andrea Baisero, Florian T. Pokorny, Danica Kragic, Carl Henrik Ek

ICPRAM: International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, 2013

pdf

2012

Topological Constraints and Kernel-Based Density Estimation

Florian T. Pokorny, Carl Henrik Ek, Hedvig Kjellström, Danica Kragic

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, Workshop on Algebraic Topology and Machine Learning, 2012

pdf

Persistent Homology for Learning Densities with Bounded Support

Florian T. Pokorny, Carl Henrik Ek, Hedvig Kjellström, Danica Kragic

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, 2012, pp. 1826--1834

pdf

2011

Toric partial density functions and stability of toric varieties

Florian T. Pokorny, Michael Singer

ArXiv Preprint

pdf

The Bergman Kernel on Toric Kähler Manifolds

Florian T. Pokorny

PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh, 2011

pdf, bibtex, abstract

Copyright and Disclaimer

This is a personal homepage. Opinions expressed here or implied by links provided do not represent the official views of KTH Royal Institute of Technology. © Florian T. Pokorny, all rights reserved.