Chao Tang

Hi, I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning (RPL), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, advised by Prof. Danica Kragic. Previously, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), advised by Chair Professor Hong Zhang. I was also a visiting Ph.D. student in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), advised by Chair Professor David Hsu. I received my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2020 (advised by Prof. Patricio Vela) and my B.Eng. in Automation from Nanjing Tech University in 2018.

My research interests include robotic manipulation and grasping, mobile manipulation, human-robot interaction, and semantic reasoning for robots. The ultimate goal is to develop autonomous agents capable of perceiving, reasoning, and interacting with the physical world at a human level of intelligence. Recently, my work has focused on building generalizable frameworks for robotic manipulation and grasping by leveraging the capabilities of foundation models.

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in my research or would like to collaborate!

email  /  CV  /  google scholar  /  Twitter

• 01/08/2025: My first CoRL paper! Excited to share that our work, MimicFunc, which explores the problem of imitating tool manipulation skills from a single human video, has been accepted to CoRL 2025. Paper, code, and video will be available soon. Stay tuned!
• 24/06/2025: Two co-authored papers have been accepted to IROS 2025 — one on diffusion-based task-oriented grasping, and the other on LLM-based task planning. See you in Hangzhou!
• 15/05/2025: 🎓 Excited to share that I have successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis: “Generalizable Task-Oriented Grasping and Manipulation with Foundation Models.” The presentation slides are publicly available here — feel free to check them out!
• 21/02/2025: Thrilled to announce that I'll be joining RPL @ KTH as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. Danica Kragic this Fall! Excited for this new journey! 🚀
• 31/01/2025: Check out our latest work, “FUNCTO: Function-Centric One-Shot Imitation Learning for Tool Manipulation,” which explores learning tool manipulation from a single human demonstration. More details are available on the project website.
• 06/02/2025: FoundationGrasp, an extension from our previous RA-L work GraspGPT, has been accpted to T-ASE.
• 31/01/2025: First accpted paper of 2025! Our work "RTAGrasp: Learning Task-Oriented Grasping from Human Videos via Retrieval, Transfer, and Alignment" has been accpted to ICRA 2025. See you all in ATL!
• 21/10/2024: Our work "Commonsense Scene Graph-based Target Localization for Object Search" has won the EDM Workshop @ IROS 2024 Best Paper Finalist! Congratulations!
• 20/10/2024: Fist time to Middle East and the UAE. Also, a fruitful journey to IROS 2024! See you all in next conference!
• 20/05/2024: Enjoying a fantastic time in Japan at ICRA 2024! It's great to catch up with old friends and make new ones. See you all next time!

1. MimicFunc: Imitating Tool Manipulation from a Single Human Video via Functional Correspondence
   Chao Tang, Anxing Xiao, Yuhong Deng, Tianrun Hu, Wenlong Dong, Hanbo Zhang, David Hsu, Hong Zhang
   9th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025.
   preprint / website / code / video


2. FoundationGrasp: Generalizable Task-Oriented Grasping with Foundation Models
   Chao Tang, Dehao Huang, Wenlong Dong, Ruinian Xu, Hong Zhang
   IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), 2025.
   preprint / website / code / video


3. GraspGPT: Leveraging Semantic Knowledge from A Large Language Model for Task-Oriented Grasping
   Chao Tang, Dehao Huang, Wenqi Ge, Weiyu Liu, Hong Zhang
   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023.
   paper / website / code / video


4. Task-Oriented Grasp Prediction with Visual-Language Inputs
   Chao Tang, Dehao Huang, Lingxiao Meng, Weiyu Liu, Hong Zhang
   IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023.
   paper / arxiv / video


5. Relationship Oriented Semantic Scene Understanding for Daily Manipulation Tasks
   Chao Tang, Jingwen Yu, Weinan Chen, Bingyi Xia, Hong Zhang
   IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022.
   paper / video / slides


6. An affordance keypoint detection network for robot manipulation
   Ruinian Xu, Fujen Chu, Chao Tang, Patricio Vela
   IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2021.
   paper / code


7. Using synthetic data and deep networks to recognize primitive shapes for object grasping
   Yunzhi Lin^*, Chao Tang^*, Fujen Chu, Patricio Vela (*-equal contribution)
   IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020.
   paper / website /code / video

• Graduate Teaching Assistant: EE 5346 - Autonomous Robot Navigation, Spring 2023.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant: EE 101 - Electronic and Information Technology for Metaverse, Fall 2023.
• Graduate Teaching Assistant: EE 5058 - Introduction to Information Technology, Spring 2024.

• Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Reviewer
• Pattern Recognition (PR) Reviewer
• Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing Reviewer
• Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) Reviewer
• IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) Reviewer
• IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (T-II) Reviewer
• IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) Reviewer
• IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Reviewer
• IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Reviewer
• IEEE ICRA 2021 Organizing Committee & Outstanding Volunteer

last updated: Aug. 2025 | template from here