Research

Soft Robotics

Self-healing soft robotic grippers featured on the cover of Advanced Intelligent Systems

I design compliant, form-adaptive, and resilient robot bodies that use morphology and material intelligence to simplify physical interaction. This work spans hybrid suction-jamming grippers, self-healing soft grippers, variable-stiffness fingers, and integrated sensing, with an emphasis on reliable operation in uncertain and industrial environments.

Keywords: soft grippers, self-healing materials, variable stiffness, embodied intelligence, soft sensing

Selected papers

IEEE Spectrum coverage Robot video Cambridge media coverage ICRA26 Oral Present

Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous robotic hand shown during teleoperation and physical interaction

I develop dexterous hands and arm-hand systems that manage high-dimensional motion through mechanical coordination, task-oriented morphology, and embodied dimensionality reduction. Piano playing, hand-object interaction, and teleoperation provide demanding testbeds for studying anthropomorphic design, passive dynamics, contact-aware control, and real-time multi-joint coordination.

Keywords: dexterous hands, arm-hand coordination, anthropomorphic design, teleoperation, contact-rich manipulation

Selected papers

CHIA 2024 award-winning flash talk Cambridge Feature

Bio-Inspired Robot Design and Control

Bio-inspired embodied control and human-robot cooperative piano-playing frameworks

I draw inspiration from nervous, musculoskeletal, and behavioral systems to co-design robot morphology and control. This direction combines neural rhythm generation, embodied dynamics, adaptive locomotion, and human-robot co-adaptation, seeking efficient behavior that emerges from the interaction among controller, body, environment, and human partners.

Keywords: bio-inspired robotics, embodied control, neural rhythms, adaptive locomotion, human-robot co-adaptation

Selected papers

Bio-inspired robot fish feature (Chinese) Talks and presentations

Academic Services

Role Event Name Time/Venue
Program Chair The 6th International Conference on Embodied Intelligence Online, 2026
Associate Chair The 24th Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems Conference (TAROS) Cambridge, 2023
Guest Editor Biomimetics Special Issue: Biomimetic Humanoid Robotics: From Foundation Models to Whole-Body Control
Co-guest editor with Prof. Junzhi Yu 		Biomimetics (SCIE, JCR Q1), 2026-2027
Review Editor Front. Robot. AI, Soft Robotics Section 2023
Special Issue Guest Editor Front. Robot. AI Special Issues 2024, 2025
Reviewer T-RO; T-ASE; MMT; SORO; RA-L; AISY; ARR; EAAI; SciRep; ICRA; IROS; RoboSoft; ASR; Front. Robot. AI; Sensors Selected journals and conferences

Mentoring Experience

Year Mentee Project / Institution
2026 Baptiste Ferrer Semester Project, EPFL
2026 Victor Van den Heuvel Master Project, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2025 Yu (Antares) Zhang PhD, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
2024 Mingqi Yuan PhD student, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
2023 Lawrence Schofield Master Thesis, University of Cambridge
2022 Emily Zhang Undergraduate, University of Cambridge

Teaching Assistant

Term Course Details
2022 Fall Integrated Design Project, University of Cambridge, Part IB Undergraduate course; Instructor: Dr. Gemma Bale
2021 Fall 4M20: Introduction to Robotics, University of Cambridge, Tripos Part IIB Undergraduate and postgraduate course; Instructors: Prof. Fumiya Iida and Prof. Amanda Prorok