Zhuo Chen

I am a Ph.D. candidate (now third year) in the Robot Perception Lab(RPL), supervised by Prof. Shan Luo at King’s College London. I am also a research intern supervised by Prof. Jiankang Deng at Imperial College London and an incoming research scientist intern at Nvidia Seattle Robotics Lab in 2026 summer. My passion lies in endowing robots with tactile sensing abilities akin to humans. My Ph.D. research primarily focuses on (1) robot tactile/force sensing & control, (2) foundation models across diverse tactile sensors, including vision-based tactile sensors and electronic skins, (3) vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) models in contact-rich robot grasping and manipulation tasks. I contribute to above three aspects by designing/fabricating new sensor/skins, leveraging physical simulation techniques, sim-to-real transfer, and deep learning-based methods, including generative learning, transfer learning, and imitation learning. I serve as reviewer for T-RO, RA-L, ICRA, IROS, and Advanced Robotics Research.

Before starting my Ph.D., I spent one year as a fully-funded visiting student at the National University of Singapore, conducting research on Manta Ray robots, supervised by Prof. Chew Chee-Meng. I obtained my master’s degree from Xiamen University, where my research interests included the simulation, fabrication, and verification of flexible tactile sensors and their applications in robotics.