Mechanical Systems Control Lab

Double Champions at the RoCo Challenge at IROS 2026

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 04:00:00 -0700

We won 1st place in both tracks of the 2nd RoCo Challenge at IROS 2026: Industrial Board Assembly and Brick Assembly. The challenge benchmarks Physical AI through complex robotic assembly and dexterous manipulation. We’re thrilled to take home both championships and grateful to everyone who made this exciting competition possible!

Mechanical System Control Workshop (Tomizuka Festival)

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:00:00 -0700

We held the Mechanical System Control Workshop (Tomizuka Festival) on 7 August to honour Prof Tomizuka’s half-century legacy. Professor Tomizuka has mentored generations of researchers and engineers throughout his distinguished career. This event served as a wonderful opportunity to reconnect, share memories, and celebrate his enduring legacy. We thank all family members, students, colleagues and friends of Prof Tomizuka for attending and participating.

The recordings of the Workshop can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/live/xw8u08IIovc.

We are also building a Tomizuka Academic Family Tree: https://tomi80th.github.io/tomizukafest/family-tree/index.html. We are trying to involve every doctoral student of Professor Tomizuka — and, generation by generation, their students too.

Event Organization Credits to: Roberto Horowitz, Tsu-Chin Tsao, George Chiu, Bin Yao, Xu Chen, Boyuan Liang
Photo Credits to: Qiyang Qian, Yuxin Chen and other photographers
Academic Family Tree Credits to: Yuxin Chen

Graduation Party of Batch 2026

Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Prof Tomizuka hosted a party to celebrate the graduation of batch 2026. Congratulations to all new Ph.D.’s! (Photo Credit to: Yuxin Chen)

Students for Soft Robotics Research Wanted

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 04:00:00 -0700

We are seeking motivated undergraduate or visiting students to work in the Soft Robotics and Interfaces research project. The project details can be found in the Research section. If you are interested, please email Wenjie (Jeff) Li.

Graduation Party of Batch 2024/2025

Sat, 24 May 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Prof Tomizuka hosted a party to celebrate the graduation of batch 2024 and 2025. Congratulations to all new Ph.D.’s! (Photo Credit to: Chenfeng Xu)

Five Papers Accepted to ICLR

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 04:00:00 -0700

This year, the MSC lab has five papers accepted to ICLR 2025! Congratulations to all contributors of these works.

Y. Xie, C. Xu, C. Peng, S. Zhao, N. Ho, A. T. Pham, M. Ding, M. Tomizuka, W. Zhan, “X-Drive: Cross-modality Consistent Multi-Sensor Data Synthesis for Driving Scenarios”, in ICLR, 2025.
Y. Shimizu, M. Tomizuka, “Bisimulation Metric for Model Predictive Control”, in ICLR, 2025.
Q. Wang, J. Ke, M. Tomizuka, K. Keutzer, C. Xu, “Dobi-SVD: Differential SVD for LLM Compression and Some New Perspectives”, in ICLR, 2025.
F. Liang, A. Kodaira, C. Xu, M. Tomizuka, K. Keutzer, D. Marculescu, “Looking Backward: Streaming Video-to-Video Translation with Feature Banks”, in ICLR, 2025.
P. Wang, C. Li, C. Weaver, K. Kawamoto, M. Tomizuka, C. Tang, W. Zhan “Residual-MPPI: Online Policy Customization for Continuous Control”, in ICLR, 2025.

Spring Retreat

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 04:00:00 -0700

A group of MSC members had a spring retreat at Fremont, CA in March 2025. The Bay Area’s spring is breathtakingly beautiful, with lush green grass blanketing the landscape, creating a vibrant tapestry of color and life. (Photo Edited by Yushu Chen, Texts by Perplexity AI)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 03:00:00 -0800

The MSC lab celebrated the 2024 Thanksgiving at Prof Tomizuka’s house. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Conference Paper Received Best Paper Award for Industrial Robotics Research

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 04:00:00 -0700

The paper Harnessing with Twisting: Single-Arm Deformable Linear Object Manipulation for Industrial Harnessing Task presented on IROS 2024 received the Best Paper Award for Industrial Robotics Research! Congratulations to all contributors of this work!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0800

The MSC lab celebrated the 2023 Thanksgiving at Prof Tomizuka’s house. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! (Photo Credit to: Yuxin Chen)