Focus Period lund 2026
PhD Student
French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation – Inria (France)
Roland Andrews is a second-year PhD student supervised by Adrien Taylor and Justin Carpentier in the SIERRA and WILLOW teams at Inria (Paris). His PhD focuses on optimization for robotics. He has written a theoretical paper on the augmented Lagrangian method and is currently working on improving contact models in robotics simulators using diffusion-model-like approaches. The goal of this project is to reduce the sim-to-real gap for contact interactions, so that an RL policy trained in simulation and then deployed on a real robot transfers reliably (for instance for contacts such as a robot’s feet with a slippery ground, or the fingers of a robotic hand manipulating an object).
On a personal note, Roland Andrews is an avid runner (feel free to invite for a jog!). He enjoys reading about various subjects like neurobiology, sociology, psychology, and futuristic science fiction. He also follows geopolitics and world news, and loves discussing and debating these topics.