Brijen Thananjeyan

I am a PhD Student at UC Berkeley in the UC Berkeley AUTOLAB, a part of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, and the Real-Time Intelligent Secure Explainable Systems (RISE) Lab, advised by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Gonzalez. I am interested in safe and efficient learning algorithms for robots.

Email / LinkedIn / Twitter

Research

	PAC Best Arm Identification Under a Deadline Brijen Thananjeyan, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Ion Stoica, Michael I. Jordan, Ken Goldberg, Joseph E. Gonzalez In submission. pdf
	SimNet: Enabling Robust Unknown Object Manipulation from Pure Synthetic Data via Stereo Thomas Kollar, Michael Laskey, Kevin Stone, Brijen Thananjeyan, Mark Tjersland* Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2021. pdf / website / blog post / code
	LS³: Latent Space Safe Sets for Long-Horizon Visuomotor Control of Sparse Reward Iterative Tasks Albert Wilcox, Ashwin Balakrishna, Brijen Thananjeyan, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2021. pdf / website / code
	Disentangling Dense Multi-Cable Knots Vainavi Viswanath, Jennifer Grannen, Priya Sundaresan, Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ellen Novoseller, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Michael Laskey, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021.* pdf
	LazyDAgger: Reducing Context Switching in Interactive Imitation Learning Ryan Hoque, Ashwin Balakrishna, Carl Putterman, Michael Luo, Daniel S. Brown, Daniel Seita, Brijen Thananjeyan, Ellen Novoseller, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2021. pdf
	Untangling Dense Nonplanar Knots by Learning Manipulation Features and Recovery Policies Priya Sundaresan, Jennifer Grannen, Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Ellen Novoseller, Minho Hwang, Michael Laskey, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2021. pdf / website
	Resource Allocation in Multi-armed Bandit Exploration: Overcoming Sublinear Scaling with Adaptive Parallelism Brijen Thananjeyan, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Ion Stoica, Michael I. Jordan, Ken Goldberg, Joseph E. Gonzalez International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021. Long Presentation pdf
	Recovery RL: Safe Reinforcement Learning with Learned Recovery Zones Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Suraj Nair, Michael Luo, Krishnan Srinivasan, Minho Hwang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Julian Ibarz, Chelsea Finn, Ken Goldberg IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) July 2021 and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021. website / pdf
	Superhuman Surgical Peg Transfer Using Depth-Sensing and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks Minho Hwang, Brijen Thananjeyan, Daniel Seita, Jeffrey Ichnowksi, Samuel Paradis, Danyal Fer, Thomas Low, Ken Goldberg arXiv 2020. pdf / New York Times article / website / code / 3D models
	Learning Dense Visual Correspondences in Simulation to Smooth and Fold Real Fabrics Aditya Ganapathi, Priya Sundaresan, Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Daniel Seita, Jennifer Grannen, Minho Hwang, Ryan Hoque, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Nawid Jamali, Katsu Yamane, Soshi Iba, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021. website / pdf
	Intermittent Visual Servoing: Efficiently Learning Policies Robust to Instrument Changes for High-precision Surgical Manipulation Samuel Paradis, Minho Hwang, Brijen Thananjeyan, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Daniel Seita, Danyal Fer, Thomas Low, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021. website / pdf
	Untangling Dense Knots by Learning Task-Relevant Keypoints Jennifer Grannen, Priya Sundaresan, Brijen Thananjeyan, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Ashwin Balakrishna, Minho Hwang, Vainavi Viswanath, Michael Laskey, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2020. Oral Presentation website / pdf
	Efficiently Calibrating Cable-Driven Surgical Robots with RGBD Fiducial Sensing and Recurrent Neural Networks Minho Hwang, Brijen Thananjeyan, Sam Paradis, Daniel Seita, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Danyal Fer, Thomas Low, Ken Goldberg IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) July 2020. website / pdf
	Deep Imitation Learning of Sequential Fabric Smoothing From an Algorithmic Supervisor Daniel Seita, Aditya Ganapathi, Ryan Hoque, Minho Hwang, Edward Cen, Ajay Kumar Tanwani, Ashwin Balakrishna, Brijen Thananjeyan, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Nawid Jamali, Katsu Yamane, Soshi Iba, John Canny, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020. website / pdf
	ABC-LMPC: Safe Sample-Based Learning MPC for Stochastic Nonlinear Dynamical Systems with Adjustable Boundary Conditions Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ugo Rosolia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Aaron Ames, Ken Goldberg Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2020. pdf
	Safety Augmented Value Estimation from Demonstrations (SAVED): Safe Deep Model-Based RL for Sparse Cost Robotic Tasks Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ugo Rosolia, Felix Li, Rowan McAllister, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Sergey Levine, Francesco Borrelli, Ken Goldberg IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) February 2020 and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020. website / pdf
	Learning Rope Manipulation Policies Using Dense Object Descriptors Trained on Synthetic Depth Data Priya Sundaresan, Jennifer Grannen, Brijen Thananjeyan, Ashwin Balakrishna, Michael Laskey, Kevin Stone, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020. website / pdf
	Applying Depth-Sensing to Automated Surgical Manipulation with a da Vinci Robot Minho Hwang, Daniel Seita, Brijen Thananjeyan, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Samuel Paradis, Danyal Fer, Thomas Low, Ken Goldberg International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR), 2020. website / pdf
	On-Policy Robot Imitation Learning from a Converging Supervisor Ashwin Balakrishna, Brijen Thananjeyan, Jonathan Lee, Arsh Zahed, Felix Li, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2019. Oral Presentation pdf
	Automated Extraction of Surgical Needles from Tissue Phantoms Priya Sundaresan, Brijen Thananjeyan, Johnathan Chiu, Danyal Fer, Ken Goldberg IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2019. pdf

On-Policy Imitation Learning from an Improving Supervisor
Ashwin Balakrishna*, Brijen Thananjeyan*, Jonathan Lee, Arsh Zahed, Felix Li, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ken Goldberg
Real World Sequential Decision Making Workshop at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2019.
pdf

Optimizing Robot-Assisted Surgery Suture Plans to Avoid Joint Limits and Singularities
Brijen Thananjeyan, Ajay Tanwani, Jessica Ji, Danyal Fer, Vatsal Patel, Sanjay Krishnan, Ken Goldberg
International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR), 2019. Oral Presentation
pdf

Generalizing Robot Imitation Learning with Invariant Hidden Semi-Markov Models
Ajay Kumar Tanwani, Jonathan Lee, Brijen Thananjeyan, Michael Laskey, Sanjay Krishnan, Roy Fox, Ken Goldberg, and Sylvain Calinon
Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2018.
pdf

SWIRL: A Sequential Windowed Inverse Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Robot Tasks with Delayed Rewards
Sanjay Krishnan, Animesh Garg, Richard Liaw, Brijen Thananjeyan, Lauren Miller, Florian T Pokorny, Ken Goldberg
The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR). Volume 37. Issue 9. July, 2018.
pdf

Multilateral Surgical Pattern Cutting in 2D Orthotropic Gauze with Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies for Tensioning
Brijen Thananjeyan, Animesh Garg, Sanjay Krishnan, Carolyn Chen, Lauren Miller, Ken Goldberg
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017.
pdf

SWIRL: A Sequential Windowed Inverse Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Robot Tasks With Delayed Rewards
Sanjay Krishnan, Animesh Garg, Richard Liaw, Brijen Thananjeyan, Lauren Miller, Florian T. Pokorny, and Ken Goldberg
Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2016.
pdf

Workshops

NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Safe and Robust Control of Uncertain Systems
Organizers: Ashwin Balakrishna, Brijen Thananjeyan, Daniel S. Brown, Sylvia Herbert, Marek Petrik, Melanie Zeilinger

This workshop brings together researchers from both industry and academia working on a wide range of topics from theoretical work on safety guarantees for learning-based control systems to practical systems for effective deployment in safety critical settings.

Teaching

Co-Instructor, CS189 Summer 2019

Co-Instructor, CS188 Summer 2019

Teaching Assistant, CS188 Spring 2018

Teaching Assistant, CS188 Fall 2017

Teaching Assistant, CS70 Spring 2017

Teaching Assistant, EE16A Fall 2016

Teaching Assistant, CS61BL Summer 2016

Reader, EE120 Spring 2016

Reader, CS70 Fall 2015

Website template from Jon Barron