About
Hao Zhang is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst). He is a roboticist and the director of the Human-Centered Robotics Laboratory (HCRLab) at UMass, which conducts research in lifelong collaborative autonomy, robot adaptation and learning, and human-robot teaming. Dr. Zhang is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award for his work on robot reflection in lifelong adaptation. He is also the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) and a DARPA Director's Fellowship for his research on Autonomous Group Introspective Learning and coopEtition (AGILE) for cross-capability multi-robot adaptation. Dr. Zhang is directing the Program for Robotics Outreach on Gender and Racial Equity in School and Society (PROGRESS) at UMass Amherst.
Research
Dr. Zhang focuses on innovative theoretical and applied research on lifelong collaborative autonomy, with the goal of enabling intelligent robots to collaborate with robotic and human teammates and to operate over long periods of time. His research lies at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), with specific topics focusing on robot adaptation/learning and human-robot/swarm teaming in unstructured, novel, and adversarial environments. His research has been deployed in a variety of real-world applications, such as manufacturing, connected autonomous driving, homeland security, and robot-assisted inspection and repair, which has led to new robotics solutions with solid algorithmic foundations to address environmental, social and economic issues.
Dr. Zhang has published extensively in robotics and AI areas, and received international recognition in the form of best paper awards and nominations from Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), and IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). He has also served as an associate editor of RA-L and on organizing and/or program committees of top-tier robotics and AI conferences such as CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, and AAAI.
Sponsors of Dr. Zhang's research have included the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Office (ARO), United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Transportation (DOT), Toyota Motor North America, and DCP Midstream.
Selected Recent Publications
Full publication list locates at HCRLab's Complete Publication page.Robot Adaptation
- Sriram Siva, Maggie Wigness, John Rogers, Long Quang, and Hao Zhang, "NAUTS: Negotiation for adaptation to unstructured terrain surfaces", in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022.
- Sriram Siva, Maggie Wigness, John Rogers, and Hao Zhang, "Enhancing consistent ground maneuverability by robot adaptation to complex off-road terrains", in Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2021.
- Brian Reily, Terran Mott, and Hao Zhang, "Adaptation to team composition changes for heterogeneous multi-robot sensor coverage", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021.
- Sriram Siva, Maggie Wigness, John Rogers, and Hao Zhang, "Robot adaptation to unstructured terrains by joint representation and apprenticeship learning", in Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2019.
Collaborative Perception
- Peng Gao, Brian Reily, Rui Guo, Hongsheng Lu, Qingzhao Zhu, and Hao Zhang, "Asynchronous collaborative localization by integrating spatiotemporal graph learning with model-based estimation", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.
- Peng Gao and Hao Zhang, "Bayesian deep graph matching for correspondence identification in collaborative perception", in Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), 2021.
- Peng Gao, Rui Guo, Hongsheng Lu, and Hao Zhang, "Multi-view sensor fusion by integrating model-based estimation and graph learning for collaborative object localization", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021.
- Peng Gao, Rui Guo, Hongsheng Lu, and Hao Zhang, "Regularized graph matching for correspondence identification under uncertainty in collaborative perception", in Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), 2020.
Multi-Robot Teaming
- Peng Gao, Sriram Siva, Anthony Micciche, and Hao Zhang, "Collaborative scheduling with adaptation to failure for heterogeneous robot teams", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.
- Brian Reily and Hao Zhang, "Team assignment for heterogeneous multi-robot sensor coverage through graph representation learning", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021.
- Brian Reily, Christopher Reardon, and Hao Zhang, "Representing multi-robot structure through multimodal graph embedding for the selection of robot teams", in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020.
- Brian Reily, Christopher Reardon, and Hao Zhang, "Leading multi-agent teams to multiple goals while maintaining communication", in Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), 2020.
Human-Robot Collaboration
- Sriram Siva and Hao Zhang, "Robot perceptual adaptation to environment changes for long-term human teammate following", in International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), vol.41, no.7, 2022.
- Brian Reily, Peng Gao, Fei Han, Hua Wang, and Hao Zhang, "Real-time recognition of team behaviors by multisensory graph-embedded robot learning", in International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 2021, accepted.
- Ryan Blake Jackson, Sihui Li, Santosh Balajee Banisetty, Sriram Siva∗, Hao Zhang, Neil Dantam, and Tom Williams, "An integrated approach to context-sensitive moral cognition in robot cognitive architectures", in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021. Finalist for Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics.
Teaching
- COMPSCI 603: Robotics, 2022-Present
Professional Activities
- Associate Editor, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2019-2022.
- Co-Chair of Junior Researcher Events on Organizing Committee, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015.
- Senior Program Committee Member, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2018.
- Program Committee, International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022-present.
- Program Committee Member, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2021-present.
- Program Committee Member, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020-present.
- Program Committee Member, Robotics Science and Systems (RSS), 2016, 2018-present.
- Program Committee Member, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2016-2017, 2019-present.
- Program Committee Member, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2018-Present.
- Associate Editor on Conference Editorial Board, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015-2017.
- Associate Editor on Conference Editorial Board, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015, 2017.
- Associate Editor on Conference Editorial Board, IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), 2015-2019.
- Reviewer for TRO, TMECH, RA-L, TASE, SORO, RAS, RAM, TCyb, THMS, TIP, TCSVT, and JIRS.
Contact Information
Office: LGRC A357 E-mail: hao.zhang AT cs.umass.edu HCRLab: https://hcr.cs.umass.edu |
Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences University of Massachusetts Amherst 740 N Pleasant St, Amherst, MA 01003 |