Zhe Huang

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Zhe Huang

Human-Centered Autonomy Lab
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Coordinated Science Laboratory
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Email: zheh4@illinois.edu

[Google Scholar | GitHub | LinkedIn]

About me

I received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024, where I was honored to be supervised by Prof. Katherine Driggs-Campbell. I am also a research scientist at Meta. I received the M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2019 and the B.Eng. degree in Energy and Power Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2017.

My research is focused on building Human-Centered Embodied AI to enable robots to safely and efficiently interact with humans and the physical world. A major challenge to achieve this goal is that existing fully autonomous robots do not have sufficient understanding of human behavior, and act conservatively with humans around to guarantee safety of humans and themselves, which is at the cost of efficiency. I develop human-centered autonomy frameworks including human prediction and robot planning with human intent and human trajectory as interface for robots to achieve challenging human-involved open-world tasks. My works integrate well-established algorithmic primitives and novel machine learning techniques to offer efficiency improvement under safety guarantees. My works illustrate generality of Human-Centered Embodied AI across various applications including autonomous driving, crowd navigation, collaborative manufacturing, and collaborative cooking.

My research areas are Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Human-Robot Interaction.

My Ph.D. thesis: Bridging Prediction and Planning for Human-Centered Autonomy.

News

Publications

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Interaction-aware Conformal Prediction for Crowd Navigation

Zhe Huang, Tianchen Ji, Heling Zhang, Fatemeh Cheraghi Pouria, Katherine Driggs-Campbell, Roy Dong

WAFR 2024

[paper]

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LIT: Large Language Model Driven Intention Tracking for Proactive Human-Robot Collaboration – A Robot Sous-Chef Application

Zhe Huang, John Pohovey, Ananya Yammanuru, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

Spotlight Presentation at CVPR 2024 Workshop on Computer Vision in the Wild

CVPR 2024 Annual Embodied AI Workshop

[arXiv]

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Neural Informed RRT*: Learning-based Path Planning with Point Cloud State Representations under Admissible Ellipsoidal Constraints

Zhe Huang, Hongyu Chen, John Pohovey, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

ICRA 2024

[paper] [arXiv] [project] [main code] [ROS code] [presentation] [demo]

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Hierarchical Intention Tracking for Robust Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Assembly Tasks

Zhe Huang*, Ye-Ji Mun*, Xiang Li†, Yiqing Xie†, Ninghan Zhong†, Weihang Liang, Junyi Geng, Tan Chen, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

ICRA 2023

[paper] [arXiv] [project] [presentation]

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Intention Aware Robot Crowd Navigation with Attention-Based Interaction Graph

Shuijing Liu, Peixin Chang, Zhe Huang, Neeloy Chakraborty, Kaiwen Hong, Weihang Liang, D. Livingston McPherson, Junyi Geng, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

ICRA 2023

[paper] [arXiv] [project] [code] [presentation] [demo]

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Learning Sparse Interaction Graphs of Partially Detected Pedestrians for Trajectory Prediction

Zhe Huang, Ruohua Li, Kazuki Shin, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

RA-L with ICRA 2022 presentation option

[paper] [arXiv] [project] [code] [presentation] [demo]

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Long-Term Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Using Mutable Intention Filter and Warp LSTM

Zhe Huang, Aamir Hasan, Kazuki Shin, Ruohua Li, Katherine Driggs-Campbell

RA-L 2020

[paper] [arXiv] [code]

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Online Monitoring for Safe Pedestrian-Vehicle Interactions

Peter Du, Zhe Huang†, Tianqi Liu†, Tianchen Ji†, Ke Xu†, Qichao Gao†,Hussein Sibai, Katherine Driggs-Campbell, Sayan Mitra

ITSC 2020

[paper] [arXiv]

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3D Electromagnetic Reconfiguration Enabled by Soft Continuum Robots

Lucia T. Gan, Laura H. Blumenschein, Zhe Huang, Allison M. Okamura, Elliot W. Hawkes, Jonathan A. Fan

RA-L 2020

[paper]

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A Voice Interface for Drilling Systems

Crispin Chatar, Zhe Huang, Peter Hadrovic

IADC/SPE International Drilling Conference and Exhibition 2020

[paper]

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High Accuracy Flight State Identification of a Self-Sensing Wing via Machine Learning Approaches

Zhe Huang, Hongyi Zhao, Cheng Liu, Xi Chen, Fotis Kopsaftopoulos, Fu-Kuo Chang

Structural Health Monitoring 2019

[paper]