Kevin Black

Email | Scholar | GitHub | Twitter

Hi, I'm Kevin. I'm currently a PhD student at Berkeley AI advised by Professor Sergey Levine. I am graciously supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Previously, I graduated from UT Austin where I worked with Professor Scott Niekum. Before that, I worked on the Seeker mission as part of the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory. I was a member of the Turing Scholars and Dean's Scholars honors programs.

Publications

Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy

Octo Model Team: K. Black, D. Ghosh, H. Walke, K. Pertsch, O. Mees, S. Dasari, J. Hejna, C. Xu, J. Luo, T. Kreiman, Y. L. Tan, D. Sadigh, C. Finn, S. Levine.

Technical report.

Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Pretrained Image-Editing Diffusion Models

K. Black, M. Nakamoto, P. Atreya, H. Walke, C. Finn, A. Kumar, S. Levine.

ICLR 2024 (Poster).

BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale

H. Walke, K. Black, A. Lee, M. J. Kim, M. Du, C. Zheng, T. Zhao, P. Hansen-Estruch, Q. Vuong, A. He, V. Myers, K. Fang, C. Finn, S. Levine.

CoRL 2023 (Poster).

ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation

D. Shah, A. Sridhar, N. Dashora, K. Stachowicz, K. Black, N. Hirose, S. Levine.

CoRL 2023 (Oral).

Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning

K. Black, M. Janner, Y. Du, I. Kostrikov, S. Levine.

ICLR 2024 (Poster).

Flight-Ready, Non-Cooperative Spacecraft Pose Estimation Using Monocular Imagery

K. Black, S. Shankar, D. Fonseka, J. Deutsch, A. Dhir, M. R. Akella.

31st AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting, 2021.

A Pipeline for Vision-Based On-Orbit Proximity Operations Using Deep Learning and Synthetic Imagery

C. Schubert, K. Black, D. Fonseka, A. Dhir, J. Deutsch, N. Dhamani, G. Martin, M. R. Akella.

2021 IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2021.

Projects

Grad School

An open-source diffusion policy transformer for robotic manipulation pretrained on the Open-X Embodiment dataset

A lightweight dataloading library for video data, used in Octo

Undergrad

Generates synthetic training data for deep learning computer vision tasks using Blender

A simple web-based Object Pose Annotation Tool for manually annotating images with 6D pose information

A working quadcopter flight controller written in SystemVerilog and deployed to an FPGA

An automated 911 call handler intended for disaster relief scenarios that uses natural language processing to cluster calls by incident (HackMIT 2019)

A smart typing trainer for programmers that learns from the user in real time and targets more difficult patterns (HackDFW 2019)

Turns an image of a key into a working 3D-printed copy (HackTX 2018)

High School

A nationals-winning device built for the Science Olympiad high school competition

A 32-bit microcontroller applet from my summer 2017 internship at Silicon Labs

A website and custom content management system created for my high school

An Android app allowing Austin ISD students to easily check their grades