Members

Principal Investigator

Jihong Zhu is a lecturer (assistant professor) in robotics at School of Physics, Engineering and Technology, University of York and a visiting researcher at Cognitive Robotics, TU Delft. He was a postdoctoral researcher jointly at Cognitive Robotics, TU Delft and Honda Research Institute, Europe working with Prof. Jens Kober and Dr. Michael Gienger (Honda Research Institute, Europe). He obtained his PhD in robotics from the University of Montpellier in the south of France where he did his research in the Interactive Digital Humans Team at Le Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM).

Co-PI

年糕 (rice cake in English) is an indoor cat that specialising in being cute and comforting. He was born in Lille, France in 2017 and grew up in Montpellier in the south of France. He then moved with me to the Netherlands and resided in Delft, then to York the UK. He holds a French passport (So he can travel freely in EU without needing a visa while I still need to apply for visa when I want to come back to Europe). He DOES NOT speak French or English.

Doctoral Students

Disclaimer: I only list students that I am the main supervisor, whom I spend a significant amount of time and effort in guiding them. I do have students that I am secondary supervisor but until now I am more of a NPC in their supervision so they are not listed here.

John Bateman (2023) is a doctoral student working on multi-expert imitation learning with me and Prof. Andy Tyrrell. He obtained his MEng at the University of York with First Class Honours.

Sumaya Alsefri (2024) is a doctoral student working on AI for assistive robots with me and Dr Hadi El Daou. She obtained her MSc in embedded systems at the University of Leeds with Distinction.

Jonathon Pipe (2024) is a doctoral student working on the robot chemist project with me, Prof. Andy Tyrrell and Prof. Ian Fairlamb. He obtained his MSc in robotics at the University of Hull with Distinction.

Kefeng Huang (2024) is a doctoral student working on the robot chemist project with me, Prof. Andy Tyrrell and Prof. Ian Fairlamb. He obtained his MEng in Computer Science at UCL with First Class Honours.

Liman Wang (2024) is a doctoral student working on the LLM-based caregiving robots, she obtained her MSc in robotics at the University of York with Distinction.

Jian Zhao (2024) is a doctoral student working on Deformable Object Manipulation. He obtained his BEng and MSc at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

PDRA

Dr. Ioannis Stefanakos obtained his PhD at York and is currently a member of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP), he works on the CRUK project for 50% FTE.

Robot Technician

Dr. Tianyuan Wang obtained his PhD at York, he works on the CRUK project for 50% FTE as a techncian.

Visiting Scholars

Alumni

Liman Wang MSc York, worked on YOLO object detection and a survey on deformable object manipulation in caregiving.

Jianyong Sun MSc TU Delft, now research assistant with Prof. Fei Chen at The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Yulei Qiu MSc TU Delft, incoming PhD student with full international scholarship at University of Leeds with Prof. Mehmet Dogar

Chai-Yu Tsai MSc TU Delft, Engineer at ASML