Ye Zhao

Dr. Ye Zhao is an Associate Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, where he directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots (LIDAR). He holds affiliations with the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Machine Learning Center, and Supply Chain and Logistics Institute. Dr. Zhao received his Ph.D. from UT Austin (2016) and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University.

Research Focus: His work integrates planning, control, and learning for contact-rich robots, emphasizing computationally efficient algorithms with formal safety guarantees. Key research thrusts include:

• Reactive synthesis for terrain-adaptive locomotion and manipulation
• Vision-tactile perception for deformable object grasping
• Social navigation of bipedal robots in human environments
• Distributed optimization for multi-robot coordination

His lab utilizes platforms including Mini Cheetah quadruped, Cassie biped, and custom manipulators.

Publication Trends: Recent articles demonstrate a strong focus on bridging formal methods (temporal logic, reactive synthesis) with learning-based approaches (RL, transformers) to enhance robustness in locomotion and manipulation. Key themes include terrain adaptation, human-robot interaction, and real-time model predictive control.

Awards & Honors:

• ONR Young Investigator (2023)
• NSF CAREER Award (2022)
• IEEE ICRA Best Automation Paper Finalist (2021)
• IEEE Senior Member (2022)
• Woodruff Faculty Research Award (2023)

Educational Initiatives: Leads the Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) for Agile Locomotion & Manipulation, engaging 80+ undergraduates in robotics research. The team won 1st place in Georgia Tech's VIP Innovation Competition (2021, 2022).