Chao Ni

I am a student reaseacher at Robotics and Perception Group working with Davide Scaramuzza. My research interest lies at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. My goal is to build perceptual systems that can reason in complex environments and perform complex tasks.

I finished my master thesis at Robotics System Lab at ETH Zurich with Marco Hutter. During my study at ETH Zurich, I was also lucky to work with Roland Siegwart. Prior to that, I obtained a BSc in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and a BSc in Economics at Peking University.

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[2022.11] Our paper Autonomous Navigation with a Monocular Event Camera is submitted!

[2022.06] Our paper on Learning Exploration is accepted for Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and will be presented at IROS 2022 in Kyoto!

[2022.06] I have joined Robotics and Perception Group at University of Zurich and ETH Zurich!

Here is a few projects that I am currently working on, with some of them available in preprints.

Learning to navigate in the forest using only a monocular event camera.

Leveraging demonstrations from MPC expert, the robot learns to walk over structured terrains.

By learning the distribution of optimal samples given a local map, sampling-based exploration planning can be done efficiently.

Here is a list of my past projects, including course projects and unpublished work.

We create a motion primitive library with trajectories generated by modulizable optimizers and use Model Predictive Control to track the trajectory.

Inverse Kinamtics solver for the hexpod robot is implemented, simple PD feedback is used for torque control. An obstacle avoidance algorithm is used to achieve navigation tasks.

We extract effective representation from the multi-sensory robotics data by self-supervised synchronization and use the latent representation for downstream RL tasks.

We quotient out the temporal fluctuations of the video and insert a preprocessing frame selection layer in the action recognition learning framework.

Here is a list of my personal literature reviews and pointers to some of my passions.

A literature review on Robot Learning: robot learning