About

Ye Zhao received the B.E. degree in Control Science and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 2011 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and 2016, respectively, where he also received the UT Robotics Graduate Portfolio Program degree. He received HIT Honor Undergraduate Thesis Award, and his co-authored work was recognized as the 2017 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Paper and 2016 IEEE-RAS best whole-body control paper and video award finalist. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Computer Science, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. Dr. Zhao started as an Assistant Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in January 2019. He directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots (LIDAR) at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Zhao’s research interests lie broadly in planning, control, decision-making, applied optimization, and learning algorithms of highly dynamic, under-actuated, and human-cooperative robots maneuvering in dynamically-changing, unstructured, and possibly adversarial environments. He is especially interested in computationally efficient optimization algorithms and formal methods for challenging robotics problems with formal guarantees on robustness, safety, provable correctness, autonomy, and real-time performance. The LIDAR group he leads at Georgia Tech aims at pushing the boundary of robot autonomy, intelligent decision, robust motion representation, and symbolic planning reasoning.