Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering-Lipscomb University

09/04/2026

Lipscomb Now, Lipscomb's research magazine, recently featured research publications, grants, and fellowships received by the lippyRobotics Undergraduate Research lab led by Dr. Juan Rojas. Congratulations!
https://lipscomb.edu/news/students-publish-lippy-robotics-latest-work-ai-learning-robots

robotics,

As part of Lipscomb’s rapidly growing undergraduate track in robotics engineering, four students were listed as authors on a recent article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a multi-disciplinary, open access journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on the development and real-worl...

09/02/2026

Employers! There is still time to register for the career fair! Come network with all of our amazing Engineering and Computing students and enjoy some lunch with us! Please email the Director of Professional Development, Anand Samuel at [email protected] to learn more information. Hope to see you there!

07/30/2026

Excited to share our new work: "SymmGrid — Super-Scaling On-Robot Learning with Parallelized Symmetries and Egocentric–Exocentric Visual Perception".

One of the major barriers to reinforcement learning directly on physical robots is simple: it takes too long.

With SymmGrid, we ask whether we can extract substantially more learning value from every real-world robot interaction.

The idea is surprisingly simple: use parallelized branched symmetries to transform each physical trajectory into many valid, symmetry-consistent experiences. These equivalences enrich the replay buffer without requiring the robot to physically execute every transformed trajectory.

We also address a practical challenge that becomes important when moving from simulation to real robots: perception. SymmGrid supports both egocentric and exocentric cameras, using efficient homography-based visual transformations for fixed external cameras.

We evaluated SymmGrid directly on a Franka FR3 across three contact-rich manipulation tasks:
🔹 Peg insertion: 100% evaluation success in as little as 16.6 min
🔹 Cable routing: 98% evaluation success in 10.9 min
🔹 Object relocation: 92% training success in as little as 79.3 min

Across the experiments, SymmGrid achieved 1.37–2.17× faster wall-clock convergence than the SOTA baseline and improvements of up to 2.59× in normalized area under the learning curve (nAUC).

Perhaps what excites me most is where this points: real-robot reinforcement learning approaching the 10-minute range for contact-rich manipulation.
Faster on-robot learning means relying less on approximations of real contact physics in simulation—and moving closer to robots and humanoids that can efficiently learn new physical skills directly in the real world.

I’m grateful to have worked with a team of exclusively undergraduate students on this project as part of our lippyRobotics undergraduate research lab: Gabe Everett, Brice Gunter, Ryan Vander Stelt, Cleiver Ruiz-Martinez, and Blake Hull.

It's no small thing to compete at this level of research and performance with only undergraduate students.

See our project page for
📄 Paper | 💻 Code | 🎥 Videos | 🤗 Hugging Face | 📚 Tutorials:
https://lnkd.in/g89UcKtn

symmetries

07/23/2026

recent research and projects were featured in Lipscomb University's research magazine: "Lipscomb Now: Discovery & Scholarship" this Summer of 2026. Take a look.
https://issuu.com/lipscombuniversity/docs/lipscomb_now_discovery/13
https://lipscomb.edu/news/students-publish-lippy-robotics-latest-work-ai-learning-robots

The university's annual research and scholarship magazine.

07/22/2026

Spots are filling up! All of these companies have already booked their spot. Will you? Register for our Engineering and Computing Career Fair and connect with our amazing students. Email our Director of Professional Development, Anand Samuel for information on registration at [email protected].

06/17/2026

The Honor's College at Lipscomb University featured some of the research opportunities that exist at the College of Engineering, take a look!

https://youtu.be/3i1fjTJDKAI?si=I7dgSn5FrDEgAbRF

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

06/17/2026

The group at is working hard to finish this open-source open-hardware bi-manual humanoid by the end of the summer! We look forward to be working with our new robot!
https://youtu.be/QzJSBbF7zIE?si=vCoQ6qaCMczsUB-l

❤️

06/09/2026

Congratulations to Dr. Juan Rojas for winning an award from the Nvidia Academic Grant program for his work in "Accelerating Deep Reinforcement Learning via Fractal Symmetries".
Nvidia will be supporting the research by donating an RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q Workstation Edition GPU.

https://bit.ly/4e4d8Py

Submit your research proposal.

06/09/2026

The undergraduate team had a chance to present their latest reasearch at ICRA, the premiere conference in robotics, which was celebrate in Vienna, Austria. Ryan Vanderstelt and Gabe Everett presented their work in Accelerating DRL via Fractal Symmetries at the RoboARCH: Robotics Acceleration with Computing Hardware and Systems Workshop.