Zhuo Chen

Hi! I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Robot Perception Lab (RPL) at King’s College London, supervised by Prof. Shan Luo. I am also a Research Scientist Intern at the NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab, hosted by Yashraj Narang and Iretiayo Akinola. In addition, I collaborate closely with Prof. Jiankang Deng at Imperial College London on embodied AI.

I am passionate about multimodal Physical AI, with the goal of enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act robustly in the physical world through vision and touch. My research focuses on sensor-invariant physical representations, generative modeling, and cross-embodiment learning for contact-rich robot manipulation. In particular, my Ph.D. research advances robotic dexterity through human-level tactile intelligence along three interconnected directions: (1) force and tactile sensing for precise robot grapsing and manipulation; (2) foundation models that unify heterogeneous tactile sensors, from vision-based tactile sensors to electronic skins; and (3) vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) models for contact-rich robot manipulation. My work spans the full robotics stack—from sensor fabrication to physical simulation, sim-to-real transfer, and learning-based methods including generative learning, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning.

Beyond research, I actively contribute to the robotics community as a reviewer for T-RO, RA-L, RSS, ICRA, and IROS. I was selected as a member of the 2026 cohort of RSS Pioneers. I also serve as Program Chair of the 7th ViTac Workshop at ICRA and previously served as Local Arrangements Chair of the 6th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop.

Nvidia

Research Scientist Intern

Jun.26 -

Imperial College London

Research Intern

Oct. 24 - June. 26

King's College London

PhD & Research Assistant

Oct. 23 - Present

NUS

Visiting Student Researcher

Jan. 22 - Jan. 23