Closed-loop Perception, Planning, and Learning for Autonomous Robotic Systems in Unknown and Uncertain Environments
.png?sfvrsn=c7d0167b_1 "Jing Xiao (Prof)")
05 Nov 2026
11.00 AM - 12.00 PM
EEE Executive Seminar Room (S2.2-B2-53)
Public
Professor Jing Xiao
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA
Host: Wang Dan Wei (Prof)
Abstract:
Many robotic applications require a robot to operate in an environment with unknowns or uncertainty. The robot must rely on sensing and perception to feel its way around, and perception and motion need to be coupled tightly in real time: perception guides motion, while motion enables better perception. I will discuss our progress in online autonomous perception, planning, learning, and motion of a robot to achieve manipulation tasks such as contact-rich, complex assembly and dense packing, manipulation of model-free deformable linear objects, estimation of physical parameters of objects, and so on. If time allows, I will introduce our work on searching semantic objects in unknown environments and visual coverage of large unknown structures.
Biography:
Jing Xiao is the William B. Smith Professor of the Robotics Engineering Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She is also a Professor of Computer Science. Jing Xiao led the Robotics Engineering Program to become the first full-fledged Robotics Engineering Department in the U.S. in July 2020, offering comprehensive degree programs from bachelor’s to PhD’s in robotics engineering, and served as the inaugural Department Head. She is the Site Director of NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Robots and Sensors for Human Well-being (ROSE-HUB) at WPI. Before joining WPI in 2018, she was a professor and served as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she was also the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Research Award in 2015. Jing Xiao also served as the U.S. National Science Foundation Program Director for the Robotics and Human Augmentation Program. Her research spans robotics, haptics, multi-modal perception, and artificial intelligence, with two highly related themes: one is real-time adaptiveness of robots to uncertainty and uncertain changes in an environment based on perception, and the other is robot manipulation in the presence of unknowns and uncertainties. Jing Xiao is an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. She is an IEEE Fellow. She is a recipient of the 2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation.