About

Pulkit Agrawal is a prominent robotics and machine learning researcher whose work spans robotic manipulation, locomotion, imitation learning, and object representation. At the intersection of deep learning and physical interaction, Agrawal has made foundational contributions to how robots learn to understand and act upon the world around them. Among his most influential contributions is the development of Neural Descriptor Fields (138 citations), which introduced SE(3)-equivariant object representations enabling robots to generalize manipulation skills across object categories. His early work on experiential learning of intuitive physics — where a robot autonomously accumulated over 400 hours of poking experience — demonstrated the power of self-supervised, data-driven approaches to physical reasoning (132 citations). His research on rapid locomotion via reinforcement learning achieved record-breaking speeds of 3.9 m/s for the MIT Mini Cheetah (116 citations), while DribbleBot extended agile legged robotics to real-world dynamic manipulation tasks. Agrawal has also advanced imitation learning through zero-shot visual imitation and data-efficient frameworks like JUICER, addressing the persistent challenge of learning from limited demonstrations. Collectively, his body of work — spanning hundreds of citations — reflects a consistent drive to make robots more capable, adaptable, and practical in unstructured real-world environments.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

13
H-Index
28
Papers
815
Total Citations
29
Avg Citations/Paper
🏆 Most Cited Paper
Neural Descriptor Fields: SE(3)-Equivariant Object Representations for Manipulation
138 citations · 2022
📈 Most Prolific Year: 2022 (9 Papers)
🤝 Key Collaborators: 76
🏛 Institutions: Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Berkeley College, University of California, Berkeley

Top Papers

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    Zero-Shot Visual Imitation
    73 citations · 2018
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Key Collaborators

Contact & Links

Available for collaboration
Content generated · 13 days ago