Erik Bauer

I am a roboticist working towards more intelligent and helpful machines. Currently, I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford, advised by Prof. Marco Pavone. My broad goal is to build systematic connections between data, models and runtime performance, and to turn them into actionable insights for data collection, policy learning and deployment.

Prior to joining Stanford, I finished my master's in Robotics, Systems & Control at ETH Zurich, in the Soft Robotics Lab with Prof. Robert Katzschmann and Elvis Nava, working on aerial manipulation and dexterous manipulation.

News

Oct 2026Behavior Graphs is out on arXiv.
Jul 2026Smooth Operator is out on arXiv.
Jan 2026Latent Action Diffusion was accepted to ICRA 2026.
Sep 2025Started my PhD in Computer Science at Stanford.
Jun 2025Latent Action Diffusion and mimic-one are out on arXiv.
Sep 2024Our open-source aerial manipulation platform was accepted to CoRL 2024.

Publications

Behavior Graphs: Unsupervised Graph Structures for Interpreting Robot Deployment Data

Erik Bauer, Jakob Thumm, Christopher Agia, Rohan Sinha, Chen Xu, Haruki Nishimura, Jeannette Bohg, Marco Pavone, Masha Itkina

arXiv preprint, 2026

Project arXiv
Smooth Operator: A Real-Time Sampling-Based Algorithm for Kinematic Hand Retargeting

Robert Jomar Malate, Erik Bauer, Norica Bacuieti, Stefanos Charalambous, Elvis Nava, Robert K. Katzschmann, Benedek Forrai

arXiv preprint, 2026

Project arXiv Code
Latent Action Diffusion for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

Erik Bauer, Elvis Nava, Robert K. Katzschmann

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026

Project arXiv Code
mimic-one: a Scalable Model Recipe for General Purpose Robot Dexterity

Elvis Nava, Victoriano Montesinos, Erik Bauer, Benedek Forrai, Jonas Pai, Stefan Weirich, Stephan-Daniel Gravert, Philipp Wand, Stephan Polinski, Benjamin F. Grewe, Robert K. Katzschmann

arXiv preprint, 2025

Project arXiv
An Open-Source Soft Robotic Platform for Autonomous Aerial Manipulation in the Wild

Erik Bauer, Marc Blöchlinger, Pascal Strauch, Arman Raayatsanati, Curdin Cavelti, Robert K. Katzschmann

Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024

Project arXiv Code OpenReview
BEAM: Bilevel Evaluation and Analysis of Multi-Object-Tracking Under Latency

Erik Bauer, Yue Yin, Mohamed Ayeb, Christoph Krause, Ludwig Brabetz

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2024

DOI
Autonomous Marker-Less Rapid Aerial Grasping

Erik Bauer, Barnabas Gavin Cangan, Robert K. Katzschmann

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

arXiv Code DOI
RAPTOR: Rapid Aerial Pickup and Transport of Objects by Robots

Aurel X. Appius, Erik Bauer, Marc Blöchlinger, Aashi Kalra, Robin Oberson, Arman Raayatsanati, Pascal Strauch, Sarath Suresh, Marco von Salis, Robert K. Katzschmann

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022

Project arXiv Code DOI