Florian Shkurti

Assistant Professor, Computer Science

I direct the Robot Vision and Learning (RVL) lab at the University of Toronto. I am part of the Robotics Group at the Department of Computer Science. In 2025-2026 I will be doing a sabbatical year at Ai2 in Seattle, in Dieter Fox's robotics group. My research centers around robotics and spans machine learning, perception, planning and control. My group and I develop methods and systems that enable robots to perceive, reason, and act effectively and safely, particularly in dynamic environments and alongside humans. I want to enable people to effectively specify the desired task and behavior of their robots, without requiring them to write code. I also strive to provide safety guarantees during the robot learning process and beyond, during deployment. Application areas of my research include manipulation for chemistry and biology lab automation, field robotics for environmental monitoring. I am interested in the following topics:

Reasoning and learning for robotics

• Imitation learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Inverse reinforcement learning
• Planning and control under uncertainty
• Learning-based task and motion planning
• Continual learning
• Active perception and information gathering
• Shared autonomy

Safety guarantees during robot learning and deployment

• Safe exploration in reinforcement learning
• Physically-realizable adversarial simulation scenarios
• Rare event generation
• Risk estimation and uncertainty quantification
• Policy evaluation

3D perception and generative models for simulation

• Open-world semantic mapping
• Learning manipulation skills from videos
• Dynamics models for RGB and pointclouds
• Data-driven sensor simulation
• Differentiable physics and rendering simulators

Application Area #1: robotics for chemistry and biology lab automation

• Robot manipulation
• Long-horizon planning
• Manipulation of liquids, powders, and granular media
• Multi-robot coordination and planning
• Optimal experiment design

Application Area #2: field robotics and environmental monitoring

• Visual attention and informed visual search
• Video and sensor data summarization
• Marine robotics