“The next wave of AI is physical AI and future factories will be robotic, which will orchestrate robots that are building products that are robotic.” -- Jensen Huang.

Hi, there. I'm Zhi Wang. I go by Leo. I'm a CS PhD Student at University of Maryland, advised by Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos.

I received my Bachlor's degree in Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University.

Previously, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Wenzhen Yuan as a research assistant at RoboTouch Lab, UIUC CS.

I was honored to be a research intern at the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), advised by Dr. Shaohan Huang.

I also spent time at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Jianyu Chen.

Goal: Develop intelligent robotic manipulation systems and general-purpose robot foundation models.

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profile photo Zhi (Leo) Wang
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Updates
Research Vision
My research lies at the intersection of robotics, learning, manipulations, and interactions.
My ultimate goal is to develop intelligent manipulation systems and general-purpose robot foundation models. Some sub-goals could be:

Robot Learning:

  • Using imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) for long-horizon interactions and manipulation tasks.
  • e.g., Adapt-GT, HACMan++, Robot Parkour, SPIN

    • Multimodal Learning:

  • Integrating vision, language, touch, and audio for fine-grained and effective manipulation.
  • e.g., VIMA, 3D-ViTac, MimicTouch, ObjectFolder

    • Human-Robot Interaction:

  • Enabling robots to intelligently and safely interact with humans in the open world and assist with complex tasks.
  • e.g., Dressing Robot, Feeding Robot

    • Generalizability:

  • Developing generalizable policies and learning architectures across diverse embodiments to efficiently output robot actions.
  • e.g., Diff-Control, OpenVLA, Pi0, ECE Policy
    • Publications
    DoorBot animation
    DoorBot: Closed-Loop Task Planning and Manipulation for Door Opening in the Wild with Haptic Feedback
    Zhi Wang*, Yuchen Mo*, Shengmiao Jin, Wenzhen Yuan
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
    Website / Paper / Video / Code / UIUC Summary / Dataset
    Proposed DoorBot, a haptic-aware closed-loop hierarchical control framework that enables robots to explore and open different unseen doors in the wild. We test our system on 20 unseen doors across different buildings, featuring diverse appearances and mechanical types. Our framework achieves a 90% success rate, demonstrating its ability to generalize and robustly handle varied door-opening tasks.


    KOSMOS-E diagram
    KOSMOS-E: Learning to Follow Instruction for Robotic Grasping
    Zhi Wang*, Xun Wu*, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Wenhui Wang, Shuming Ma, Furu Wei
    IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System (IROS), 2024, Oral Pitch
    Website / Paper / Video / Code /
    Proposed KOSMOS-E, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that leverages instruction-following robotic grasping data to enhance capabilities for precise and intricate robotic grasping maneuvers.
    Education
    Experiences
    Leaderships & Activities

    Chair of the Electronic Engineering Hardware Group, Tsinghua University2021 - 2023

    • 30-Person Team, Tsinghua University [Website]
    • Organized two major annual, university-wide competitions, engaging over 450 participants.

    Leader of Hardware and Vision Team in Future Robot Club (FuRoC), Tsinghua University2021 - 2023

    • 15-Person Team, Tsinghua University [Website] [GitHub]
    • Led the team of Tinker, a domestic service robot, participating in annual RoboCup@Home Competition.
    Teaching Experience
    Honors & Awards
    MISC