Robotics and Mechatronics

Points of contact: Dr. Jianshu Zhou, Boyuan Liang

We are developing cutting edge robotics and mechtronics systems for robotic grasping, dexterous manipulation, human-robot interface, and intelligent skill transfer.

  1. Innovative Robotic Grippers and Manipulators
  2. Dexterous Hands for Fine In-hand Manipulation and Skill Transfer
  3. Human–Robot Interfaces and Collaboration

Robot Learning

Point of contact: Yixiao Wang

In robot learning research, our goal is to analyze and address critical challenges in developing generalist robot policies capable of diverse tasks across varied environments. Our current efforts focus on effective and scalable multimodal reasoning (vision, force, language) and policy representation learning, continual learning, and their generalizations.

Embodied AI and Loco-manipulation

Point of contact: Yuxin Chen

Our research in Embodied AI and Loco-manipulation pushes the boundaries of both high-level reasoning and low-level planning/control for robots with diverse physical embodiments operating in open-vocabulary, real-world environments. We focus on the full life cycle of embodied AI systems, from data collection to deployment:

  1. Teleoperation and Data Curation – Developing automated pipelines to gather high-value, long-horizon, multi-modal demonstrations for training advanced AI agents.
  2. Generalist Pre-training & Specialist Post-training – Designing novel post-training alignment frameworks that adapt powerful pre-trained generalist robots into safe, efficient, and task-specialized agents.
  3. Loco-manipulation – Advancing model-based and learning-based control methods to enable complex, coordinated interactions between robots and their environments, across platforms including humanoids, quadrupeds, and robotic arms.

Through this integrated approach, we aim to create versatile embodied AI systems capable of perceiving, reasoning, and acting seamlessly in dynamic, unstructured settings.

To learn more about the research done at MSC in the past, you can download a research booklet here or check the “Previous Porjects” below.