Zhuo Chen

King's College London, London, UK.

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I am a Ph.D. candidate 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. 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) visual-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.

news

Sep 30, 2025 One paper is accepted to R-AL. Congratulations to Zhiyuan!
Jun 30, 2025 One paper is accepted to IROS 2025!
Jan 30, 2025 One paper is accepted to ICRA 2025!
Jan 08, 2025 I am honored to be the co-organizer (local arrangement chair) of the 6th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop. More than 300 attendees from academia, industry and tech-company are hosted at King’s!
Nov 15, 2024 I am starting a new position as AI research intern at Imperial College London & Noah’s Ark Lab, London!
Oct 30, 2024 I gave a talk at the workshop of “Collecting, Managing, and Utilizing Data through Embodied Robots” in IROS 2025!
Aug 19, 2024 One paper is accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (R-AL) & ICRA 2025!
Jun 30, 2024 I am honored to host K+ academic workshop and robotics year-8 session at King’s in this summer. More than 60 high school students played fun during the fabrication and application of GelSight sensor.
Jun 30, 2024 One paper is accepted to IROS 2024 !
Oct 01, 2023 I start my Phd at robot perception lab at King’s College London under supervision by Prof. Shan Luo!
Feb 10, 2023 I receive fullly-funded offer for Phd program in King’s College London and International Max Plank Research School for Intelligent System (IMPRS-IS) .
Oct 15, 2022 I am awarded National Scholarship (Top 1%) for Postgraduate from Ministry of Education, China!

selected publications  ·  see Google Scholar

  1. under review
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    Training Tactile Sensors to Learn Force Sensing from Each Other
    Zhuo Chen, Ni Ou, Xuyang Zhang, Zhiyuan Wu, Yongqiang Zhao, Yupeng Wang, Nathan Lepora, Lorenzo Jamone, Jiankang Deng, and Shan Luo
    Under Review @ Nature Communications, 2025
  2. RA-L 2025
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    ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-to-Touch Generation
    Zhiyuan Wu, Yijiong Lin, Yongqiang Zhao, Xuyang Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lepora Nathan, and Shan Luo
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025
  3. IROS 2025
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    Iterative Camera-LiDAR Extrinsic Optimization via Surrogate Diffusion
    Ni Ou, Zhuo Chen, Xinru Zhang, and Junzheng Wang
    IROS, 2025
  4. ICRA 2025
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    TransForce: Transferable Force Prediction for Vision-based Tactile Sensors with Sequential Image Translation
    Zhuo Chen, Ni Ou, Xuyang Zhang, and Shan Luo
    ICRA, 2025
  5. IROS 2024
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    Deep domain adaptation regression for force calibration of optical tactile sensors
    Zhuo Chen, Ni Ou, Jiaqi Jiang, and Shan Luo
    IROS, 2024
  6. RA-L/ICRA2025
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    Marker or markerless? mode-switchable optical tactile sensing for diverse robot tasks
    Ni Ou, Zhuo Chen, and Shan Luo
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2024
  7. ACS ami
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    Laser-sculptured hierarchical spinous structures for ultra-high-sensitivity iontronic sensors with a broad operation range
    Zhuo Chen, Yang Zhang, Bin Zhu, Yigen Wu, Xiaohui Du, Liwei Lin, and Dezhi Wu
    ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 2022
  8. Nanotechnology
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    A flexible tactile sensor that uses polyimide/graphene oxide nanofiber as dielectric membrane for vertical and lateral force detection
    Xianshu Cheng, Zhuo Chen, Zhenjin Xu, Minjie Zhu, Yang Zhao, Rui Zhu, Liwei Lin, and Dezhi Wu
    Nanotechnology, 2022