Associate Professor Lyu Chen Receives 2026 IEEE ITSS Young Researcher/Engineer Award

NTU MAE congratulates Associate Professor Lyu Chen on receiving the 2026 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS) Young Researcher/Engineer Award.

Presented annually by the IEEE ITS Society, the award recognises early career contributions and leadership in intelligent transportation systems. Only one researcher worldwide is selected each year.

Prof Lyu is Director of the AutoMan Research Lab, Research Director (Engineering and Physical Sciences) at Vice President's Research Office, and Director of MSc in Robotics and Intelligent Systems. He joined NTU in 2018, after a PhD at Tsinghua University with a joint PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research fellowship at Cranfield University.

Autonomous shuttle bus from the AutoMan Research Lab's work in collaboration with Continental Automotive, Singapore.

His years in autonomous vehicles have spanned a major shift in the field. "When I started working in autonomous vehicles, much of the research focused on solving individual problems in perception, planning and control, and then integrating these components into a complete system," he said.

"Over the years, the field has shifted dramatically towards data-driven and increasingly end-to-end approaches, enabled by advances in AI and access to large-scale driving data."

Autonomous vehicles have also moved from research prototypes to real-world deployment, including commercial robotaxi services in some cities. "The research question is therefore also changing, from simply asking whether a vehicle can drive itself to asking how it can continuously learn, reason about complex and unfamiliar situations, and operate safely and reliably in the real world," said Prof Lyu.

That question runs through his work on human-in-the-loop AI, where real-time human guidance helps autonomous systems learn faster and keep learning over time. His study, "Toward human-in-the-loop AI: Enhancing deep reinforcement learning via real-time human guidance for autonomous driving," published in the journal Engineering, showed how this guidance can improve the training of self-driving systems.

Human-in-the-loop deep reinforcement learning, where real-time human guidance helps train the driving agent.

Prof Lyu has contributed four books, more than 200 papers and 12 granted patents. He serves as Senior Editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

His recent honours include the IEEE ITSC Best Paper Award (First Prize) 2025, 1st Place at the ITSS x LTA Hackathon Singapore 2025 and the IEEE IROS New Generation Star Project 2025. He also holds World Championship titles in the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL), from the 2025 SIM-Sprint Challenge and the league's 2026 event in Imola, Italy.

Looking ahead, Prof Lyu sees the field entering a new stage. "I believe the next stage will be about building autonomous systems that are not only capable of performing predefined tasks, but are truly intelligent, adaptive and trustworthy," he said.

"Foundation models, world models and continual learning are creating new possibilities for machines to understand complex environments, anticipate what may happen next, learn from human knowledge and experience, and continuously improve through interaction with the real world."

His next focus is to extend what the lab has learned from autonomous driving to humanoid robots, autonomous mobile robots, drones and quadruped robots. "Although these systems differ greatly in their physical forms and operating environments, they share many fundamental challenges in perception, reasoning, decision-making, learning and safe physical interaction," he explained.

Diverse robotic platforms developed by AutoMan Lab for safer and more efficient autonomous navigation and exploration in real world environments.

"Ultimately, I hope to contribute towards physical AI and intelligent machines that can learn, adapt and act safely and effectively across diverse real-world environments," he said.

Find out more about Prof Lyu's research at the AutoMan Research Lab.

Congratulations, Prof Lyu!