Eric Heiden

Eric Heiden

Research Scientist

NVIDIA

I am a research scientist at NVIDIA, working on physics simulators and their applications in robotics. My research is focused on reducing the sim2real gap. I am investigating simulators as semantic models of the world that can be updated from measurements. Such models are parameterized by physically meaningful variables and can enable robots to perform complex tasks.

I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) advised by Gaurav Sukhatme and was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. I received a Master’s degree from USC, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Rostock (Germany).

Interests

  • Robot learning
  • Physics simulators
  • Autonomous robots
  • Task and Motion Planning

Education

  • PhD Computer Science, 2022

    University of Southern California

  • MSc Computer Science (Intelligent Robotics), 2017

    University of Southern California

  • BSc Computer Science, 2015

    University of Rostock, Germany

Journal Articles

(2020). Bench-MR: A Motion Planning Benchmark for Wheeled Mobile Robots. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2021 and presented at ICRA 2021 and the ICAPS 2021 Workshop on Planning and Robotics (PlanRob).

PDF Code Project Poster Slides Video DOI Website

(2019). Scaling simulation-to-real transfer by learning composable robot skills. International Journal of Robotics Research.

PDF Code Project Video DOI

(2019). Confidence-rich Grid Mapping. International Journal of Robotics Research.

PDF Project DOI

Conference Proceedings

(2019). LAMP: Large-Scale Autonomous Mapping and Positioning for Exploration of Perceptually-Degraded Subterranean Environments. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020.

PDF Project DOI

(2019). Physics-based Simulation of Continuous-Wave LIDAR for Localization, Calibration and Tracking. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2020.

PDF Project Slides Video DOI

(2019). Auto-conditioned Recurrent Mixture Density Networks for Learning Generalizable Robotic Manipulation Skills. Southern California Robotics Symposium (SCR).

PDF Project Poster Slides Video

(2018). Heterogeneous Sensor Fusion via Confidence-rich 3D Grid Mapping: Application to Physical Robots. International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER).

PDF Project DOI

(2018). Scaling simulation-to-real transfer by learning composable robot skills. International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER).

PDF Code Video

(2018). Gradient-Informed Path Smoothing for Wheeled Mobile Robots. In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

PDF Code Project Video

(2017). Confidence-rich Grid Mapping. International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR).

PDF Project Slides DOI

(2017). Planning High-speed Safe Trajectories in Confidence-rich Maps. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

PDF Project Project Slides DOI

(2017). Concept and Realization of a Diagnostic System for Smart Environments. International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART).

PDF DOI

Workshop articles & Abstracts

(2020). Sparse-Input Neural Network Augmentations for Differentiable Simulators. DiffCVGP Workshop.

PDF Code Project Poster Video

(2020). Augmenting Differentiable Simulators with Neural Networks to Close the Sim2Real Gap. R:SS 2020 Workshop on Closing the Reality Gap in Sim2Real Transfer for Robotics.

PDF Code Project Video

(2019). Automatic Differentiation and Continuous Sensitivity Analysis of Rigid Body Dynamics.

PDF Project

(2019). Real2Sim Transfer using Differentiable Physics. R:SS Workshop on Closing the Reality Gap in Sim2real Transfer for Robotic Manipulation.

PDF Project

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Research Scientist

NVIDIA

Jun 2022 – Present Seattle, WA (Remote)
Closing the sim2real gap in robotics
 
 
 
 
 

Deep Learning Intern

NVIDIA

May 2020 – May 2022 Seattle, WA (Remote)
Closing the sim2real gap in robotic cutting via differentiable physics
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Google Brain

Jan 2020 – May 2020 Mountain View, CA
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

May 2018 – Aug 2018 Pasadena, CA
Researched representations and algorithms enabling autonomy of novel robot platforms.
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineering Intern

Two Sigma Investments

May 2016 – Aug 2016 New York, NY
Added support for parallel computing platform Apache Spark to the data science toolbox Beaker Notebook (now BeakerX).
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

Information Sciences Institute (ISI)

Jan 2016 – May 2017 Marina del Rey, CA
Built large-scale information retrieval system for gaining information about >300k firms from company web pages.
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineering Intern

Microsoft

Sep 2014 – Mar 2015 Dublin, Ireland
Built business intelligence dashboard and language processing tools for software engineering teams.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Assistant

University of Rostock

Oct 2012 – Jun 2014 Rostock, Germany
Designed software tools and assisted with research projects in ubiquitous computing, bioinformatics, and web services.