Curriculum Vitae

I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Chair of Robotics, AI, and Real-Time Systems at TUM, under the supervision of Prof. Alois Knoll (IEEE Fellow). I earned my Ph.D. from the same lab. Before joining TUM, I conducted research at Tongji University. My research interests include autonomous driving, robotic grasping, medical image analysis, and dense prediction (classification, detection, and segmentation). I have been a guest academic at ETH Zurich (supervised by Prof. Lothar Thiele) and HKU (working with Prof. Hengshuang Zhao), and I completed a research internship at Huawei under the supervision of Prof. Qi Tian (IEEE Fellow).

I have published several papers at top AI and robotics conferences and journals, including TPAMI, TAI, SPM, TITS, TIV, T-MECH, TIM, CVPR, ECCV, ICRA, and IROS. My works have garnered over 4037 Google Scholar citations. I serve as the Associate Editor of the journal Frontiers in Neurorobotics and join the editorial board of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (AIAS). Additionally, I was a distinguished reviewer for IEEE TMI for 2022–2023 and was invited to organize special issues for Frontiers in Neuroscience and Frontiers in Robotics and AI (both SCI journals).

Online Profile

• PersonalHomepage ; GoogleScholar ; Github

Academic Activities

• Editor Services:  Associate Editor for Frontiers in Neurorobotics,  Editorial board of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (AIAS)​​​​​​​, Topic Editors for Frontiers in Robotics and AI (SCI),  Topic Coordinator for Frontiers in Neuroscience (SCI).
• Conference Reviewers/Program Committee Member (PC): CVPR, ECCV,  AAAI, ACM MM, ACL, MICCAI, ICRA, IROS.
• Journal Reviewers: TIP, TCYB, TMI, MIA, TNNLS, TCSVT, TAI, T-ASE, T-Mech, TIV, RAL, TIE, TCE, TCI, TII, TIM, TIMM, JBHI, TGRS, PR, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Neurorobotics, Automotive Innovation, The Visual Computer, Signal, Image, and Video Processing.

Offered Research Topics (Guided Research, FP, IDP, SA, BA, MA, etc.)

The general research focus is as follows:

• Topic 1: Vision language model for robotic grasp pose estimation (4D and 6D).
• Topic 2: Object detection and semantic segmentation for autonomous driving.
• Topic 3: Multi-modal or multi-sensor fusion for robust object perception (2D/3D detection, segmentation, depth estimation, end-to-end autonomous driving, etc.).
• Topic 4: Correspondence-free absolute pose estimation algorithm (point cloud registration or globally optimal algorithms).
• Topic 5: Large language model and vision language model for robotics (autonomous vehicles or robotic grasping).
• Topic 6: Medical image segmentation.

I am also looking for highly self-motivated students to work on risk-based safety autonomous driving research. The topics include:

• Topic 1: LLM for safety-critical scenario generation for autonomous vehicles.
• Topic 2: Bayesian networks for real-time risk assessment in ADS.
• Topic 3: Risk quantification for automated driving systems based on SOTIF (ISO 21448), Responsibility Sensitive Safety (RSS), and Safety Force Field (SFF).
• Topic 4: Uncertainty estimation for autonomous driving perception.
• Topic 5: Modality-Incomplete autonomous driving perception (e.g., sensor failure).
• Topic 6: Autonomous driving perception based on adverse weather image restoration.

If you are interested in these research topics, please send me an email with your CV and transcript of records. We also have several other open topics in robotics and welcome proposals or ideas from your side. For more information, please contact hu.cao@tum.de

Demos for Autonomous Driving and Robotic Grasping