Chao Zhao
chaozhao at jlu dot edu dot cn

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University. I received my Ph.D. from HKUST in 2025 (advisor: Prof. Qifeng Chen) and my Master’s from the University of Birmingham (advisor: Prof. Jeremy Wyatt). My research interests span dexterous hands, tactile multimodality, and long-term autonomy in humanoid robots.

I lead the Embodied Intelligence and Robotics Lab (EIRL), where we develop algorithms and systems that endow robots with intelligence—enabling them to perceive, reason, act, and assist humans effectively in real-world environments.

Openings: I will have one Ph.D. position and 2–3 Master's openings each year. Feel free to reach out if you're interested!

招生信息： 我每年招收一名博士生和两到三名硕士生，欢迎感兴趣的同学联系我！

Updates

Research

* indicates equal contribution

Master Rules from Chaos thumbnail
Master Rules from Chaos: Learning to Reason, Plan, and Interact from Chaos for Tangram Assembly

Chao Zhao*, Chunli Jiang*, Lifan Luo, Guanlan Zhang, Hongyu Yu, Michael Yu Wang, Qifeng Chen

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025

Website • ArXiv • Code

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Learning thin deformable object manipulation with embodied multisensory integration

Chao Zhao*, Chunli Jiang*, Lifan Luo*, Shuai Yuan, Qifeng Chen, Hongyu Yu

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)

Website • ArXiv • Code

ERRA thumbnail
ERRA: An Embodied Representation and Reasoning Architecture for Long-horizon Language-conditioned Manipulation Tasks

Chao Zhao*, Shuai Yuan*, Chunli Jiang, Junhao Cai, Hongyu Yu, Michael Yu Wang, Qifeng Chen

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2023

Website • ArXiv • Video • Code

Flipbot thumbnail
Flipbot: Learn Continuous Paper Flipping via Coarse-to-Fine Exteroceptive-Proprioceptive Exploration

Chao Zhao*, Chunli Jiang*, Junhao Cai, Hongyu Yu, Michael Yu Wang, Qifeng Chen

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023

Website • ArXiv • Video • Code

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Learn to Grasp via Intention Discovery and its Application to Challenging Clutter

Chao Zhao, Chunli Jiang, Junhao Cai, Hongyu Yu, Michael Yu Wang, Qifeng Chen

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2023

Website • ArXiv • Video • Code

Learn from Interaction thumbnail
Learn from Interaction: Learning to Pick via Reinforcement Learning in Challenging Clutter

Chao Zhao, Jungwon Seo

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2022

Paper

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Learning to Pick by Digging: Data-Driven Dig-Grasping for Bin Picking from Clutter

Chao Zhao*, Zhekai Tong*, Juan Rojas, Jungwon Seo

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2022

Website • ArXiv • Video

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Deep dexterous grasping of novel objects from a single view

Umit Rusen Aktas, Chao Zhao, Marek Kopicki, Ales Leonardis, Jeremy L. Wyatt

International Journal of Humanoid Robotics 2022

Website • ArXiv

Teaching & Outreach