Hello! I’m a robotics researcher at Toyota Research Institute (TRI) with interests spanning machine learning, robot control, and extended reality (XR) headsets. At the intersection of these interests is my overarching goal of establishing effective human-robot interactions where people live and work.

My recent work has focused on improving robot foundation models, such as vision-language-action (VLA) models. Through the Large Behavior Models project and TRI’s collaboration with Boston Dynamics to deploy these models on the eAtlas humanoid, I have contributed across the full stack, from data collection, processing, and curation to policy training, evaluation, and deployment in simulation and on hardware. I am especially interested in interactive imitation learning as a means of enabling VLA models to collaborate with people in personalized and customizable ways.

Prior to joining TRI, I was a research scientist in robotics at Northeastern University, serving as a research lead on NSF and DARPA projects. I hold a PhD in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Imperial College London, where my research focused on augmented reality headset interfaces, shared control for robot teleoperation, and learning-based methods for estimating human intent.

Email: mark[dot]zolotas[at]tri[dot]global

A Systematic Study of Data Modalities and Strategies for Co-training Large Behavior Models for Robot Manipulation
Fanqi Lin, Kushal Arora, Jean Mercat, Haruki Nishimura, Paarth Shah, Chen Xu, Mengchao Zhang, Mark Zolotas, Maya Angeles, Owen Pfannenstiehl, Andrew Beaulieu, Jose Barreiros

TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation
Rishabh Madan, Angchen Xie, Samantha Saak, Andres Blanco, Dohyeok Lee, Sarah Grace Brown, Yunting Yan, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee

RAG-Diff: Adapting Diffusion Policies to Dynamic Constraints with Retrieval-Augmented Guidance
Ruolin Ye, Nayoung Ha, Shuaixing Chen, Qiandao Liu, Gavin Chen, Shaoyang Stassen, Mark Zolotas, Jose Barreiros, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee

Large Behavior Models and Atlas Find New Footing
Boston Dynamics and TRI Research Team

A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulation
Large Behavior Models Team, TRI