Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez

I am a Senior Researcher at OMRON SINIC X, working on robot learning for contact-rich manipulation — the moments where a robot stops moving freely and starts pushing, inserting, or cutting. That transition is where most real manipulation tasks get hard, and it runs through everything from industrial assembly to cooking.

My work follows three threads. The first is learning force and compliance control on position-controlled robots: variable compliance for peg-in-hole assembly, hybrid trajectory-and-force learning to imitate human assembly skills, and more recently diffusion policies for compliant manipulation. The second is soft robotics and tactile sensing, where mechanical compliance and touch make insertion, scooping, and fine powder handling robust to uncertainty that rigid systems handle poorly. The third is vision-language-guided task and motion planning, turning long-horizon instructions into executable plans for assembly and food preparation.

Some of this work has traveled beyond the lab. Our robot food-slicing framework, SliceIt!, was featured by IEEE Spectrum, and the assembly system I helped build with Team O2AC took 3rd place and a JSAI special award at the World Robot Summit 2020 Industrial Assembly Challenge.

I received my Ph.D. in engineering (2022) and M.Eng. in intelligent systems (2019) from Osaka University, and my B.Sc. in computer science from the University of La Sabana, Colombia (2013).

news

Jun 17, 2026	We have two papers accepted to IROS 2026!: Grounded Vision-Language Interpreter for Long-Horizon Bimanual Task and Motion Planning Jeremy Siburian, Keisuke Shirai, Cristian Camilo Beltran-Hernandez, Masashi Hamaya, Michael Görner, Atsushi Hashimoto PHASE: Compliance-Enabled Tactile Phase Retrieval for Few-Shot Insertion Learning Jeremy Siburian, Cristian Camilo Beltran-Hernandez, Tatsuya Matsushima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Masashi Hamaya, Mai Nishimura
Jun 01, 2026	We got two papers were accepted to the journal of Robotics and Automation Letters! Tactile Memory with Soft Robot: Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wrist Tatsuya Kamijo, Mai Nishimura, Nodoka Shibasaki, Jeremy, Cristian C. Beltran Hernandez, Masashi Hamaya A Soft Wrist with Anisotropic and Selectable Stiffness for Robust Robot Learning in Contact-rich Manipulation Steven oh, Takahashi Tomoya, Cristian C. Beltran Hernandez, Kuroda Yuki, Masashi Hamaya
Feb 01, 2026	We have three papers accepted to ICRA 2026!: Robust and Resilient Soft Robotic Object Insertion with Compliance-Enabled Contact Formation and Failure Recovery Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameterization for Contact-Rich Granular Scooping with a Soft Conical Robotic Hand A Flexible Funnel-Shaped Robotic Hand with an Integrated Single-Sheet Valve for Milligram-Scale Powder Handling

selected publications

IROS

Grounded Vision-Language Interpreter for Integrated Task and Motion Planning

Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Jeremy Siburian, Keisuke Shirai, Masashi Hamaya, Michael Görner, and 1 more author

2026

arXiv Bib Blog

@misc{siburian2025groundedvisionlanguageinterpreterintegrated,
  title = {Grounded Vision-Language Interpreter for Integrated Task and Motion Planning},
  author = {Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C. and Siburian, Jeremy and Shirai, Keisuke and Hamaya, Masashi and Görner, Michael and Hashimoto, Atsushi},
  year = {2026},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.RO},
}

IROS

PHASE: Compliance-Enabled Tactile Phase Retrieval for Few-Shot Insertion Learning

Jeremy Siburian, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Tatsuya Matsushima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Masashi Hamaya, and 1 more author

2026

Bib

@article{siburian2026phase,
  author = {Siburian, Jeremy and Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C. and Matsushima, Tatsuya and Iwasawa, Yusuke and Hamaya, Masashi and Nishimura, Mai},
  title = {PHASE: Compliance-Enabled Tactile Phase Retrieval for Few-Shot Insertion Learning},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  year = {2026},
}

RA-L

A Soft Wrist with Anisotropic and Selectable Stiffness for Robust Robot Learning in Contact-rich Manipulation

Steven Oh, Tomoya Takahashi, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Yuki Kuroda, and Masashi Hamaya

arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14434, 2026

arXiv Bib

@article{oh2026softwristanisotropicselectable,
  title = {A Soft Wrist with Anisotropic and Selectable Stiffness for Robust Robot Learning in Contact-rich Manipulation},
  author = {Oh, Steven and Takahashi, Tomoya and Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C. and Kuroda, Yuki and Hamaya, Masashi},
  year = {2026},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14434}
}

RA-L

Tactile Memory with Soft Robot: Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wrist

Tatsuya Kamijo, Mai Nishimura, Cristian C Beltran-Hernandez, Nodoka Shibasaki, and Masashi Hamaya

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2026

DOI arXiv Bib

@article{kamijo2026tactile,
  title = {Tactile Memory with Soft Robot: Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wrist},
  author = {Kamijo, Tatsuya and Nishimura, Mai and Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C and Shibasaki, Nodoka and Hamaya, Masashi},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2026.3692097},
  year = {2026},
}

ICRA

Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameterization for Contact-Rich Granular Scooping with a Soft Conical Robotic Hand

Yongliang Wang, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Tomoya Takahashi, and Masashi Hamaya

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

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{yongliang2026simulation,
  title = {Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameterization for Contact-Rich Granular Scooping with a Soft Conical Robotic Hand},
  author = {Wang, Yongliang and Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C. and Takahashi, Tomoya and Hamaya, Masashi},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05531}
}

ICRA

Robust and Resilient Soft Robotic Object Insertion with Compliance-Enabled Contact Formation and Failure Recovery

Mimo Shirasaka, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Masashi Hamaya, and Yoshitaka Ushiku

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

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{shirasaka2026recovery,
  title = {Robust and Resilient Soft Robotic Object Insertion with Compliance-Enabled Contact Formation and Failure Recovery},
  author = {Shirasaka, Mimo and Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C. and Hamaya, Masashi and Ushiku, Yoshitaka},
  booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17666},
}