Vince Kurtz
Assistant Professor, DePaul University (incoming)
Visiting Research Fellow, Toyota Research Institute
Hi, I’m Vince! I’ll be joining DePaul’s School of Computing in January 2026. Until then, I’m working with the Large Behavior Models team at Toyota Research Institue.
In my research, I develop planning and control algorithms for high-degree-of-freedom robots like quadrupeds, humanoids, and manipulators. Sometimes this involves flashy things like throwing robots off ladders to get them to land on their feet: other times it’s more mundane, like getting a robot to fidget with a cube.
I previously worked as a postdoc and research scientist in the Ames and Burdick groups at Caltech. From 2017-2023 I was a PhD student in the DISCOVER lab at Notre Dame. Before grad school, I studied physics and violin performance at Goshen College.
Prospective Students: If you are a highly motivated student interested in pursuing cutting-edge robotics research in the heart of downtown Chicago, please reach out!
News
| Sep 17, 2025 | I’ll be giving a talk on my research at the Rice University Mechanical Engineering seminar series |
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| Jun 21, 2025 | Our joint work with NASA-JPL won the Best Paper Award at the RSS Workshop on Reliable Robotics! |
| Feb 22, 2025 | I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining DePaul University’s School of Computing as an Assistant Professor in January 2026! |
| Jan 21, 2025 | Over the next year, I’ll be working with the Large Behavior Models team at TRI as a Visiting Research Fellow! |
| Nov 13, 2024 | DROP won outstanding paper at the CoRL dexterous manipulation workshop! |
Recent Publications
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Risk-Guided Diffusion: Toward Deploying Robot Foundation Models In Space, Where Failure Is Not An OptionIn RSS 2025 Workshop on Reliable Robotics: Safety and Security in the Face of Generative AI , 2025 -
Equality Constrained Diffusion for Direct Trajectory OptimizationIn American Control Conference (ACC) , 2025
