Research
Publications, grants, collaborations, and supervision activities.
Real-world robotics heavily relies on sound system engineering facilitating the processing and communications of information among submodules that independently and/or collaboratively inform decisions to control a robot embodiment towards accomplishing certain tasks. My research focus on:
- 3D Perception & Action: how robots can perceive, understand and interact with the 3D world to accomplish a user-defined task?
- Autonuous & Resilient System Engineering: how autonomous systems can improve themselves by writing codes to understand and control different embodiments, environments and tasks?
- Safety: how can we prevent robots from misinterpreting user intents and perfroming dangerous actions?
Browse project showroom to see my past projects in learning/physics-based rigid and deformation obejct manipulation.
Selected Publications
- A Human-Guided Agentic Engineering Approach for Iterative Synthesis and Refinement of Cross-embodiment Robotic Manipulation Skill Structures. In progress
- DDBot: Differentiable Physics-Based Digging Robot for Unknown Granular Materials. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2025
- Differentiable Physics-based System Identification for Robotic Manipulation of Elastoplastic Materials. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2025
- GAM: General Affordance-Based Manipulation for Contact-Rich Object Disentangling Tasks. Neurocomputing, 2024
- Recent Advances of Deep Robotic Affordance Learning: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 2023
- Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Universal Policies for Multi-Step Robotic Manipulation. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021
Research Grants and Involvements
- Cardiff-Xiamen Collaboration Fund
- PHYDL: Physics-Guided Differentiable Learning for Robotic Manipulation of Deformable and Granular Materials
- Almond: Autonomous Laboratory for Molecular Discovery
Collaborators
- Ze Ji - Reader, Cardiff University
- Yu-Kun Lai - Professor, Cardiff University
- Oliver Castell - Reader, Cardiff University
- Jin Li - Lecturer, Cardiff University
- Jing Wu - Cardiff University
- Seyed Amir Tafrishi - Lecturer, Cardiff University
Student Supervision
- Minglun Wei - Co-supervised PhD student, Cardiff University (ongoing) - Deformable object manipulation
- Boliang Cai - Former co-supervised PhD student, now Research Associate at Loughborough University - Autonomous Vehicles