Educational Comics about Robotics
Short comics about hard problems in robotics, and how roboticists think about solving them.
Posts by Collection
portfolio
Tailslide (Webcomic)
A comic I’ve been working on since 2020. Has a few hundred pages, all free to read online. 
Other Comics Work
A sampling of other comics work I’ve done, mostly sci-fi or autobiographical.
Other Illustrations
Some other not-comic art that I’ve done. 
publications
Shape-based transfer of generic skills
Transferring learned skills by conditioning on latent shape features of objects and tools
Published in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),, 2021S. Thompson, L. P. Kaelbling and T. Lozano-Perez, "Shape-Based Transfer of Generic Skills," ICRA, 2021
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Towards robust planar translations using delta-manipulator arrays
Learning efficient, coordinated policies for moving objects with delta-manipulator arrays.
Published in IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), 2021S. Thompson, P. Mannam, Z. Temel and O. Kroemer, "Towards Robust Planar Translations using Delta-manipulator Arrays," ICRA, 2021
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On the role of structure in manipulation skill learning
Super-efficient real-robot RL for high-contact, composable manipulation skills.
Published in CoRL Workshop on Learning, Perception, and Long Horizon Planning, 2022E Rosen, BM Abbatematteo, S Thompson, T Akbulut, G Konidaris - CoRL 2022 Workshop on Learning, Perception, and Long Horizon Planning 2022
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One-shot imitation learning via interaction warping
Skill transfer from a single demonstration via optimization in learned geometric latent space.
Published in Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2023O Biza, S Thompson, KR Pagidi, A Kumar… - CoRL, 2023.
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Composable interaction primitives: A structured policy class for efficiently learning sustained-contact manipulation skills
Super-efficient real-robot RL for high-contact, composable manipulation skills.
Published in IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), 2024B. Abbatematteo, E. Rosen, S. Thompson, T. Akbulut, S. Rammohan and G. Konidaris, "Composable Interaction Primitives: A Structured Policy Class for Efficiently Learning Sustained-Contact Manipulation Skills," ICRA, 2024
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SkillWrapper: Generative Predicate Invention for Skill Abstraction
Active, automatic, embodiment-agnostic skill predicate learning using generative models.
Published in CoRL Learning Effective Abstractions for Planning workshop, 2025Ziyi Yang, Benned Hedegaard, Ahmed Jaafar, Yichen Wei, Skye Thompson, Shreyas S. Raman, Haotian Fu, Stefanie Tellex, George Konidaris, David Paulius, Naman Shah- CoRL LEAP workshop, 2024
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Adapting Diffusion Policies to Novel Environments via Policy-Steered Optimization
Coupling learned policies and model-based planners to generalize in novel environments.
Published in ICLR 2026 ReALM Gens workshop, 2026Skye Thompson, Sergio Orozco, Eric Rosen, Karl Schmeckpeper, George Konidaris, ICLR ReALM Gens Workshop, 2026
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One-Shot Cross-Geometry Skill Transfer through Part Decomposition
Learning semantically decomposed models to build robot manipulation skills that generalize.
Published in IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), 2026S Thompson, O Biza, G Konidaris - ICRA, 2026.
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talks
Talk 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
This is a description of your talk, which is a markdown file that can be all markdown-ified like any other post. Yay markdown!
Published:
Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
This is a description of your conference proceedings talk, note the different field in type. You can put anything in this field.
Published:
teaching
CSOUTREACH Robotics Camp
Taught yearly one-week introductory Arduino robotics courses for middle and high schoolers Designed curriculum for introducing embedded systems, control, and programming topics
Instructor, University of Texas at Dallas, 2017
BK TecHouse — Rwanda Robotics Academy
Developed curriculum for a three-week introductory robotics camp for Rwandan high school students. Guided thirty students of varying experience and english proficiency in prototyping agricultural robots.
Curriculum Design and Instructor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018
Designing the First Year at MIT
Led a team of four in evaluating student experience in their first year at MIT. Recommendations resulted in a large scale, experimental curriculum change for the incoming Class of 2022.
Course, Department Proposal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018
Spinning Arts Firespinning Trainer
Led safety trainings and evaluations for safely spinning fire for groups of 10-25 students, as well as small weekly flow arts classes. Managed weekly practice sessions and rehearsals for students, including monitoring safety and giving safety feedback
Trainer and Instructor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021
Educational Comics About Robotics - R.bot and Crow
See the Portfolio section!
Publication, Brown University, 2024
CSCI 1952D: Intelligent Robotics
Guest Lecturer, Brown University, 2026