About me

I’m a Ph.D. student in School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech, specializing in Robotics. I’m advised by Dr. Ye Zhao at the Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots (LIDAR).

Prior to that, I received an M.S. also in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2020 and a B.Eng. in Automation from Northeastern University (China) in 2018.

My research interests center around optimization-based planning, control, and estimation for contact-rich manipulation and legged locomotion, especially in:

1) Distributed trajectory optimization and model predictive control;

2) Task and motion planning for single- and multi-robot system;

3) Safe contact planning in cluttered environments.

I also collaborated closely with SkyMul to automate the rebar tying process using quadrupedal robots. Check out some of the cool things we showcased at WOC 2024!

News:

Jan 2024: I start my internship at MERL!
May 2023: Our work on soft contact manipulation is finally accepted by TRO!
Jan 2023: One paper on vision-based navigation has been accepted by ICRA.
June 2022: Our momentum-aware trajectory optimization and MPC paper has been accepted by RA-L. [pdf]
May 2022: Our multi-robot task allocation and planning work has been accepted by CASE 2022! The extended version is attached. [pdf]

Selected Publications:

Please check out my Google Scholar page for the full list of my publications.

Opt2Skill: Imitating Dynamically-feasible Whole-Body Trajectories for Versatile Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

Fukang Liu, Zhaoyuan Gu, Yilin Cai, Ziyi Zhou, Shijie Zhao, Hyunyoung Jung, Sehoon Ha, Yue Chen, Danfei Xu, Ye Zhao
arXiv preprint

Paper | Video | Website

Hierarchical Experience-informed Navigation for Multi-modal Quadrupedal Rebar Grid Traversal

Max Asselmeier, Jane Ivanova, Ziyi Zhou, Patricio A. Vela, Ye Zhao
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

Paper | Video

Real-Time Deformable-Contact-Aware Model Predictive Control for Force-Modulated Manipulation

Lasitha Wijayarathne*, Ziyi Zhou*, Ye Zhao, Frank L. Hammond III
IEEE Transactions in Robotics (TRO), 2023

Paper | Code | Video

Momentum-Aware Trajectory Optimization and Control for Agile Quadrupedal Locomotion

Ziyi Zhou*, Bruce Wingo*, Nathan Boyd, Seth Hutchinson, Ye Zhao
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022

Paper | Video

GPF-BG: A Hierarchical Vision-Based Planning Framework for Safe Quadrupedal Navigation

Shiyu Feng, Ziyi Zhou, Justin S. Smith, Max Asselmeier, Ye Zhao, Patricio A. Vela
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023

Paper | Video