Nick Heppert

	PhD Student	with ELLIS and ZUSE School ELIZA
	Postal address:	Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Technische Fakultät Robot Learning Lab Georges-Köhler-Allee 080 D-79110 Freiburg i. Br., Germany
	Office:	080-01-022
	Email:	heppert@cs.uni-freiburg.de
	Links:	Google Scholar ORCID Github LinkedIn

About me

09/2022 - current: Ph.D. Student in the Robot Learning Lab, University of Freiburg
05/2022 - 08/2022: Research Intern, Toyota Research Institute (TRI), US
04/2021 - 04/2022: Visiting Student in the Interactive Perception and Robot Learning Lab, Stanford University, US
08/2019 - 11/2021: M.Sc. in Autonomous Systems, TU Darmstadt, Germany
08/2018 - 07/2019: Visiting Exchange Student, KAIST, South Korea
01/2018 - 07/2018: Software Development Engineer Intern, Amazon Core AI, Berlin, Germany
10/2014 - 12/2017: B.Sc. in Computational Engineering, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Research Interests

Robot Perception
Continual and Self-Supervised Learning
Mobile Manipulation

Current Research Projects

Responsible and Scalable Learning for Robots Assisting Humans

Publications

View all my publications on Google Scholar.

Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Mauro Comi, Yen-Chen Lin, Nick Heppert, Abhinav Valada, Rares Ambrus, Zsolt Kira, Jonathan Tremblay,
Neural Fields in Robotics: A Survey
arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20220, 2024.
Download Website BibTeX

@article{neuralfields24survey,
      title={Neural Fields in Robotics: A Survey},
      author={Irshad, Muhammad Zubair and Comi, Mauro and Lin, Yen-Chen and Heppert, Nick and Valada, Abhinav and Ambrus, Rares and Kira, Zsolt and Tremblay, Jonathan},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.20220},
      year={2024}
}

Eugenio Chisari, Nick Heppert, Max Argus, Tim Welschehold, Thomas Brox, Abhinav Valada,
Learning Robotic Manipulation Policies from Point Clouds with Conditional Flow Matching
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024.
Download Website
Nick Heppert, Max Argus, Thomas Brox, Abhinav Valada,
DITTO: Demonstration Imitation by Trajectory Transformation
2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Abu Dhabi, UAE , 2024
ICRA Workshop on "A Future Roadmap for Sensorimotor Skill Learning for Robot Manipulation", 2024
arXiv Website
Nick Heppert*, Adrian Röfer*, Abdallah Ayman, Eugenio Chisari, Abhinav Valada,
PseudoTouch: Efficiently Imaging the Surface Feel of Objects for Robotic Manipulation.
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
arXiv Website
Eugenio Chisari, Nick Heppert, Tim Welschehold, Wolfram Burgard, Abhinav Valada
CenterGrasp: Object-Aware Implicit Representation Learning for Simultaneous Shape Reconstruction and 6-DoF Grasp Estimation
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024
IEEE Website Code

Nick Heppert, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Katherine Liu, Rares Andrei Ambrus, Jeannette Bohg, Abhinav Valada, Thomas Kollar
CARTO: Category and Joint Agnostic Reconstruction of ARTiculated Objects
2023 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vancouver, Canada, 2023.
arXiv Website BibTeX

@article{heppert23carto,
  title={CARTO: Category and Joint Agnostic Reconstruction of ARTiculated Objects},
  author={Heppert, Nick and Zubair Irshad, Muhammad and Zakharov, Sergey and Liu, Katherine and Andrei Ambrus, Rares and Bohg, Jeannette and Valada, Abhinav and Kollar, Thomas},
  journal={IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  year={2023}
}

Nick Heppert, Toki Migimatsu, Brent Yi, Claire Chen, Jeannette Bohg
Category-Independent Articulated Object Tracking with Factor Graphs
2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, 2022.
arXiv Website Code