Bernadette Bucher

Bernadette Bucher is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Department (primary) and Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on embodied AI, vision-language grounding, and mobile manipulation, with an emphasis on interpretable visual representations and uncertainty estimation for robotics tasks. She previously worked at Boston Dynamics AI Institute, NVIDIA Research, and Lockheed Martin Corporation. Her academic background includes a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania (GRASP Lab) under advisors Kostas Daniilidis and Nikolai Matni, alongside MA degrees in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Alabama (2014).

Research interests include robotics, computer vision, and machine learning intersections, particularly autonomous mobile manipulation. Her work emphasizes uncertainty-aware systems and deployable learning-based methods.

Notable achievements include the Best Paper in Cognitive Robotics at ICRA 2024. Her research spans projects like EVORA for off-road autonomy and ASHiTA for hierarchical task analysis. She has contributed to open-source projects like RoboNet and actively publishes in top conferences (CVPR, CoRL, ICRA).

• Key projects: EVORA, ASHiTA, Vision-Language Frontier Maps (VLFM)
• Grants and funding: Honda Research Institute (Curious Minded Machines project)
• Labs/Teams: Active participation in robotics labs at University of Michigan and prior collaborations with industry partners