Tucker Hermans ![](/sites/default/files/person/hermans-summer2014-square.jpg) Tucker Hermans is a senior research scientist at NVIDIA working on robotic manipulation focusing on the interaction of multi-sensory perception, learning, and control. Tucker is also an assosciate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah where he is a member of the Utah Robotics Center. Tucker earned his Ph.D. in Robotics from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Research Area(s) [Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ](/research-area/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence) [Computer Vision](/research-area/computer-vision) [Robotics](/research-area/robotics) Main Field of Interest [Robotics](/research-area/robotics) Google Scholar [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G5\_VFfkAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G5_VFfkAAAAJ&hl=en) ### Publications ### 2025 [Do What You Say: Steering Vision-Language-Action Models via Runtime Reasoning-Action Alignment Verification](/publication/2025-11_do-what-you-say-steering-vision-language-action-models-runtime-reasoning-action) Yilin Wu, [Anqi Li](/person/anqi-li), [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), [Fabio Ramos](/person/fabio-ramos), Andrea Bajcs, [Claudia Pérez D’Arpino ](/person/cdarpino) [The Reality Gap in Robotics: Challenges, Solutions, and Best Practices](/publication/2025-10_reality-gap-robotics-challenges-solutions-and-best-practices) Elie Aljalbout, Jiaxu Xing, Angel Romero, [Iretiayo Akinola](/person/iretiayo-akinola), [Caelan Garrett](/person/caelan-garrett), Eric Heiden, Abhishek Gupta, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), [Yashraj Narang](/person/yashraj-narang), Dieter Fox, Davide Scaramuzza, [Fabio Ramos](/person/fabio-ramos) [Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems 2026](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20808) [scene\_synthesizer: A Python Library for Procedural Scene Generation in Robot Manipulation](/index.php/publication/2025-01_scenesynthesizer-python-library-procedural-scene-generation-robot-manipulation) Clemens Eppner, [Adithya Murali](/index.php/person/adithya-murali), [Caelan Garrett](/index.php/person/caelan-garrett), [Rowland O'Flaherty](/index.php/person/rowland-oflaherty), [Tucker Hermans](/index.php/person/tucker-hermans), [Wei Yang](/index.php/person/wei-yang), Dieter Fox [The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)](https://joss.theoj.org/) ### 2024 [Differentiable GPU-Parallelized Task and Motion Planning](/publication/2024-11_differentiable-gpu-parallelized-task-and-motion-planning) William Shen, [Caelan Garrett](/person/caelan-garrett), Nishanth Kumar, [Ankit Goyal](/person/ankit-goyal), [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, [Fabio Ramos](/person/fabio-ramos) [Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)](https://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss21/p050.html) ### 2023 [StructDiffusion: Language-Guided Creation of Physically-Valid Structures using Unseen Objects](/publication/2023-07_structdiffusion-language-guided-creation-physically-valid-structures-using) Weiyu Liu, Yilun Du, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), Sonia Chernova, Chris Paxton [Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2023](https://roboticsconference.org/) [23 DoF Grasping Policies from a Raw Point Cloud](/publication/2023-06_23-dof-grasping-policies-raw-point-cloud) Martin Matak, Karl Van Wyk, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop on Geo…](https://www.mirmi.tum.de/mirmi/events/icra-2023-workshop/) [Planning for Multi-Object Manipulation with Graph Neural Network Relational Classifiers](/publication/2023-06_planning-multi-object-manipulation-graph-neural-network-relational-classifiers) Yixuan Huang, Adam Conkey, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans) [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)](https://www.icra2023.org/) [DefGraspNets: Grasp Planning on 3D Fields with Graph Neural Nets](/publication/2023-05_defgraspnets-grasp-planning-3d-fields-graph-neural-nets) Isabella Huang, [Yashraj Narang](/person/yashraj-narang), Ruzena Bajcsy, [Fabio Ramos](/person/fabio-ramos), [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), Dieter Fox [IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)](https://www.icra2023.org/) ### 2022 [Planning Visual-Tactile Precision Grasps via Complementary Use of Vision and Touch](/publication/2022-12_planning-visual-tactile-precision-grasps-complementary-use-vision-and-touch) Martin Matak, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans) [IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters ](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9996386) [Correcting Robot Plans with Natural Language Feedback](/publication/2022-06_correcting-robot-plans-natural-language-feedback) Pratyusha Sharma, [Balakumar Sundaralingam](/person/balakumar-sundaralingam), [Valts Blukis](/person/valts-blukis), Chris Paxton, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), Antonio Torralba, Jacob Andreas, Dieter Fox [Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2022](http://www.roboticsproceedings.org/rss18/index.html) [DefGraspSim: Physics-Based Simulation of Grasp Outcomes on 3D Deformable Objects](/publication/2022-03_defgraspsim-physics-based-simulation-grasp-outcomes-3d-deformable-objects) Isabella Huang, [Yashraj Narang](/person/yashraj-narang), Clemens Eppner, [Balakumar Sundaralingam](/person/balakumar-sundaralingam), Miles Macklin, Ruzena Bajcsy, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), Dieter Fox [IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9735347) ### 2020 [Contextual Reinforcement Learning of Visuo-tactile Multi-fingered Grasping Policies](/publication/2020-11_contextual-reinforcement-learning-visuo-tactile-multi-fingered-grasping) Visak Kumar, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), Dieter Fox, [Stan Birchfield](/person/stan-birchfield), [Jonathan Tremblay](/person/jonathan-tremblay) [NeurIPS Workshop on Robot Learning](http://www.robot-learning.ml/2020/) ### 2019 [Robust Learning of Tactile Force Estimation through Robot Interaction](/publication/2019-05_robust-learning-tactile-force-estimation-through-robot-interaction) [Balakumar Sundaralingam](/person/balakumar-sundaralingam), Alexander Lambert, Ankur Handa, Byron Boots, [Tucker Hermans](/person/tucker-hermans), [Stan Birchfield](/person/stan-birchfield), Nathan Ratliff, Dieter Fox ICRA 2019