About Me

I am currently a Reader in Robotics and AI at the Department of Engineering, King’s College London, where I lead the Robot Perception Lab (RPL). I am an enthusiastic and dedicated researcher doing research on machine learning and computer vision algorithms with applications in robotics, e.g., robot perception, object recognition & localisation, and multimodal sensing fusion.

I was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Computer Science, the University of Liverpool, from 2018 to 2021, and was Director for the smARTLab at the Department. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University from 2017 to 2018, and at the University of Leeds from 2016 to 2017. I received the PhD degree in Robotics from King’s College London, in 2016. I was a Visiting Scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, in 2016. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Contact

Email: shan.luo at kcl.ac.uk

Openings

• PhD studentships (home/international fees) available, contact me with a copy of your up-to-date CV if you are interested!

• PhD Opening: One King’s-China Scholarship Council PhD position is available, open to Chinese students. Deadline: 1st January 2025 (early submission is strongly recommended).

• Commonwealth PhD Scholarships

• Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship (for American students)

• Visiting Research Studentships

Please email me with a copy of your CV if you are interested in the above opportunities. Visit Opportunities for all the opportunities.

News

• December 2024: Our paper on multi-modality tactile sensor has been accepted to T-RO Special Collection in Tactile Robotics, congratulations to Dandan and the team!
• November 2024: Our Royal Society International Exchange Award has been granted.
• Sep 2024: Our paper on topology alignment for face recognition has been accepted to NeuRIPS 2024, congratulations to Yang and the team! paper code and models
• Sep 2024: Welcome Tuan Nguyen from JAIST and Hengfei Zhao from Tsinghua University to start visiting our group!
• Sep 2024: Welcome Zhiyuan Wu, Yongqiang Zhao, Yupeng Wang to start their PhD at our group!
• Aug 2024: Our tactile sensing technologies have been shortlisted for the 2024 Robotics and Automation Awards!
• Aug 2024: Our paper on transiting between marker and markerless optical tactile sensing is accepted to RA-L, congratulations to Ni and Zhuo! [paper link] [website]
• July 2024: One paper is accepted to ECCV 2024, congratultions to Kostas!
• June 2024: Two papers are accepted to IROS 2024, congratulations to Zhuo, Jagoda and Jiaqi!
• June 2024: Welcome Yang Liu to start his PhD at our group!
• May 2024: Congratulations to Dr Kun Wang for securing the K. C. Wong Postdoctoral Fellowship! He will join us as a postdoctoral researcher.
• May 2024: I am elevated as an IEEE Senior Member.
• April 2024: Our paper on fast simulation of optical tactile sensors is accepted to RA-L, congratulations to Yongqiang, Kun and the team! [paper link] [website]
• March 2024: We have PhD stduentships (home/international fees) available, contact me with a copy of your up-to-date CV if you are interested!
• March 2024: Our paper on multimodal zero-shot learning for tactile texture recognition has been accepted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems, congratulations to Guan and the team! [paper link]
• March 2024: Our review on road surface defect detection has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, congratulations to Jongmin and the team! [paper link]
• Feb 2024: I will give a talk at the 4th International Conference on Embodied Intelligence on 20th March, look forward to the discussions!
• Jan 2024: We have three papers accepted to ICRA 2024 (2 x ICRA, 1 x RA-L), congratulations to Jongmin, Zhonglin and Dandan, as well as all the co-authors, see you in Yokohama!
• Jan 2024: We will organise the 6th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop at King’s in 2024, look forwarding to having the workshop along the River Thames and stay tuned!
• Jan 2024: Our work on multimodal perception received the Best Workshop Poster at the 5th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop, congratulations to Jagoda and Jiaqi!
• Jan 2024: I will give a talk at the 5th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop, join us on 11th and 12th Jan 2024 in Oxford!
• Dec 2023: Our 5th ViTac workshop has been accepted to ICRA 2024, see you in Yokohama!
• Dec 2023: One A*STAR and King’s College London PhD Studentship (October 2024 Entry) is available. Applications are accepted from citizens of the UK, the EU, the USA, Canada, Latin America, and Australia.
• Oct 2023: Our review on robotic perception of transparent objects has been accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, congratulations to Jiaqi and the team! [paper link]
• Oct 2023: I serve as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2024.
• Sep 2023: I am promoted to Reader, thanks to all the RPL group members, collaborators, colleagues and funders!
• Sep 2023: Our work on Inverse Image Frequecy to improve long-tailed recognition has been accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, congratulations to Kostas and the team! [paper link]
• July 2023: Our work on GelFinger, the first multi-angle optical tactile sensor, has been accepted to RA-L, congratulations to Zhonglin and the team! [paper link]
• July 2023: Our BridgeAI project has been funded.
• July 2023: I will give a talk entitled “Empowering Robotic Manipulation: Bridging Sim-to-Real with Tactile Representations” at RSS 2023 Workshop Interdisciplinary Exploration of Generalizable Manipulation Policy Learning: Paradigms and Debates on 10th July.
• June 2023: Our work on tactile representation learning with masked autoencoders has been accepted to IROS 2023, congratulations to Guan and the team!
• June 2023: Our Robot Live Lab demo has been successully livestreamed on YouTube, check out this link for the recording of our demo!
• June 2023: I am honoured to receive the Early Career Award from the UK-RAS!
• May 2023: Our work on leveraging multi-modal sensing for robotic insertion tasks in R&D laboratories has been accepted to CASE 2023, congratulations to Aaron and the team!
• Apr 2023: Our work on simulating optical tactile sensors of complex morphologies has been accepted to RSS 2023 conference, congratulations to Daniel and the team! [paper link] [project website]
• Apr 2023: Our paper on domain adaptation for Sim2Real transfer of tactile images is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Measurement and Instrumentation, congratulations to Kun and the team!
• Mar 2023: Our TouchRoller paper is accepted to Sensors, congratulations to Guanqun and the team! paper link
• Feb 2023: We will organise a Special Issue in Tactile Robotics at IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), stay tuned!
• Feb 2023: I have been selected to join the UKRI Future Leaders Fellows Development Network’s PATHWAYS programme.
• Jan 2023: Two papers accepted to ICRA 2023, congratulations to Guanquan, Jongmin, and the team!
• Jan 2023: Our application to the Robot Live Lab event has been successful, stay tuned on our live streaming of robotics research at our Centre for Robotics Research!
• Jan 2023: Our paper on dynamic path planning is accepted to Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, congratulations to Henry and the team! paper link
• Jan 2023: Our Tacchi paper has been accepted to RA-L, congratulations to Zixi and the team! website
• Dec 2022: Our ViTac workshop has been accepted to ICRA 2023, see you in London!
• Dec 2022: Congratulations to Yiming, Hai-Ning and the team for winning the Best Paper Award at ACM SIGGRAPH VRCAI 2022 for our paper “Teleoperation of a Fast Omnidirectional Unmanned Ground Vehicle in the Cyber-Physical World via a VR Interface”!
• Nov 2022: Welcome Zhenxi (Nathan) to join our group!
• Nov 2022: Our paper on Skill Generalization of Tubular Object Manipulation with Tactile Sensing and Sim2Real Learning has been accepted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems, congratulations to Kun and the team!
• Nov 2022: I will give a talk at the 4th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop, join us on 12th and 13th Jan 2023 in Bristol!
• Oct 2022: We start a new one-year project funded by Unilever!
• Oct 2022: I am invited to give a keynote talk at the French research group in Robotics (GdR) days.
• Oct 2022: I am invited to give an invited talk at Humanoid Robotics Forum.
• Sep 2022: I will be an Associate Editor for ICRA 2023.
• Aug 2022: I am now on the IET Robotics and Mechatronics Technical Network Committee!
• Aug 2022: Our paper on vision guided tactile poking for transparent object grasping is accepted to IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (T-Mech), congratulations to Jiaqi and the team! [Paper] [Website]
• Jul 2022: I am now a UKRI EPSRC Peer Review College member.
• Jul 2022: Our A4T paper has been selected as a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at CASE 2022, vey well done Jiaqi! [Paper] [Website]
• Jul 2022: Our paper on long-tailed instance segmentation is accepted to ECCV 2022, congratulations to Kostas and the team! [Paper] [Website]
• Jun 2022: Our paper on visual-tactile multimodality for following deformable objects is accepted to IROS 2022, congratulations to Leszek and Siyuan! [Paper] [Website]
• Jun 2022: Our paper on hierarchical Affordance detection for Transparent object depth reconstruction and grasping (A4T) is accepted to CASE 2022 and Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), congratulations to Jiaqi and the team! [Paper] [Website]
• Welcome Jongmin to join our group!
• Apr 2022: One paper accepted to IROS 2022 and Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), congratulations to Min and the team!
• Apr 2022: Our book “Tactile Sensing, Skill Learning, and Robotic Dexterous Manipulation” is online!
• Mar 2022: One paper accepted to Pattern Recognition, congratulations to Jimin and the team!
• Feb 2022: I am invited to serve as an Associate Editor for IROS 2022.
• Feb 2022: Our Special Issue on “Biomimetic Perception, Cognition, and Control: From Nature to Robots” in Robotics and Automation Magazine closes on 1st Feb, 2022.
• Jan 2022: One paper accepted to ICRA 2022 on masked tactile image generation, congrats to Tudor and Daniel! The dataset and code will be made available soon. Please stay tuned. [Paper] [Website]
• Jan 2022: One paper accepted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems, congrats to Kun and the team!
• Dec 2021 - One paper accepted to IEEE Transactions on Haptics, congrats to Hai-Ning and the team!
• Nov 2021 - Started my new position as Senior Lecturer at King’s College London.

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