Chao Tang

Hi, I’m a Robotics Ph.D. student in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), advised by Chair Professor Hong Zhang. I'm also a visiting student in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), advised by Chair Professor David Hsu. My research interests involve robotic manipulation and grasping, mobile manipulation, human-robot interaction, and semantic reasoning for robots. The ultimate goal is to develop autonomous agents that can perceive, reason, and interact with the physical world with the same level of Intelligence as humans.

Previously, I received my M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2020 (advised by Prof. Patricio Vela) and my B.Eng. in Automation from Nanjing Tech University in 2018.

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

Career update: I'll be joining RPL @ KTH as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Prof. Danica Kragic starting Fall 2025.

email  /  CV  /  google scholar  /  Twitter

• 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!
• 06/04/2024: We are presenting our works on LLM-based grasping (Robotics with Large Language Models) and multi-view rearrangement (Perception for Grasping and Manipulation III) at ICRA 2024 on 16th May. Make sure to stop by. See you in Yokohama!
• 02/04/2024: I have redirected my hosting institution to the National University of Singapore and will be a visiting Ph.D. student at AdaComp Lab for 12 months, supervised by Prof. David Hsu.

1. FUNCTO: Function-Centric One-Shot Imitation Learning for Tool Manipulation
   Chao Tang, Anxing Xiao, Yuhong Deng, Tianrun Hu, Wenlong Dong, Hanbo Zhang, David Hsu, Hong Zhang
   arxiv, 2025.
   preprint / website / 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.

• IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) Reviewer
• IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII) Reviewer
• IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) Reviewer
• IEEE ICRA Reviewer
• IEEE/RSJ IROS Reviewer
• IEEE ICRA 2021 Organizing Committee & Outstanding Volunteer

last updated: Dec. 2023 | template from here