Senior Lecturer (=Associate Professor) of Robotics, Robot-Assisted Living LAboratory (RALLA)

School of Physics, Engineering and Technology,

Institute for Safe Autonomy University of York, Heslington York, the UK.

Visiting Researcher (by courtesy),

Cognitive Robotics, Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering (3mE), TU Delft

Contact: jihong(dot)zhu(at)york(dot)ac(dot)uk

News (not so frequently updated – please check my lab’s website instead)

• Jihong serves as publicity co-chair for TAROS 2025
• Jihong is the founding co-chair of IEEE RAS Working Group on Deformable Object Manipulation together with Xiang Li, Daniel Seita, Claire Dune, Adrien Koessler
• Jihong is co-organising workshop on Learning for Assistive Robotics and also an invited speaker for Robots that help and ask for help at RSS 2024
• Our bimanual assistive dressing scheme was reported by the BBC, The independent, York Press, The Standard & TechXplore.
• new journal paper
  Jihong Zhu, Michael Gienger, Giovanni Franzese and Jens Kober. Do You Need a Hand?–a Bimanual Robotic Dressing Assistance Scheme. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2024.
• Main organiser for ICRA 24 workshop on Exploring Role Allocation in Human-Robot Co-Manipulation
• Jihong received Early Detection and Diagnosis Primer Award from CRUK
• Our Lab Robot-Assisted Living LAboratory (RALLA) website is launched! We are located at 031, Institute for Safe Autonomy
• Jihong is an invited speaker and a member of the organisation committee for The 5th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop
• Both of my previous master students’ research were accepted at 18th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2023)! Congrats Yulei and Jianyong!
  Yulei Qiu, Jihong Zhu, Cosimo Della Santina, Michael Gienger, and Jens Kober. Robotic Fabric Flattening with Wrinkle Direction Detection. In 18th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), 2023.
  Jianyong Sun, Jens Kober, Michael Gienger and Jihong Zhu. Learning from Few Demonstrations with Frame-Weighted Motion Generation. In 18th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER), 2023.
• Jihong is an invited speaker for 3rd Workshop on Representing and Manipulating Deformable Objects@ICRA2023
• Jihong gave a talk at York Medical Society entitled: “Robots in Caregiving”
• Jihong serves as an Associate Editor for IROS 2023
• Jihong visited Personal Robotics Lab@Imperial College London and gave a talk on his latest research on bimanual dressing assistance
• We proposed a bimanual assistive dressing scheme check it out at: Bimanual dressing assistance
• Workshop in assistive manipulation at ICRA’23: Emerging paradigms for assistive robotic manipulation: from research labs to the real world
• Jihong joined the editorial broad of Complex and Intelligent Systems, Springer(IF=6.7, JCR Q1)
• Master students (TU Delft) Jianyong Sun and Yulei Qiu graduated with 8.0! Congrats!
• Jihong serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2023
• Our RA-L Special Issue (SI) on Robotic Handling of Deformable Objects is now online and you can read a summary of the SI in our editorial article (open access): Editorial: Robotic Handling of Deformable Objects
• Workshop @ IROS 2022
  3rd workshop on RObotic MAnipulation of Deformable Objects: challenges in perception, planning and control for Soft Interaction (ROMADO-SI)
• Jihong is among the featured alumni from the University of Birmingham (where I obtained my bachelor degree), the link to my story: Jihong Zhu
• Jihong is appointed an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robot and Automation Letter (RA-L)
• new journal paper
  Jihong Zhu, Michael Gienger, and Jens Kober. Learning Task-Parameterized Skills from Few Demonstrations. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2022 (accepted).
• new journal paper
  Jihong Zhu, Andrea Cherubini, Claire Dune, David Navarro-Alarcon, Farshid Alambeigi, Dmitry Berenson, Fanny Ficuciello, Kensuke Harada, Jens Kober, Xiang Li, Jia Pan, Wenzhen Yuan, and Michael Gienger. Challenges and Outlook in Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (accepted).
• Workshop @ ICRA 2022
  Bi-manual Manipulation: Addressing Real-world Challenges
• Jihong serves as the program committee for 4th Robot Learning Workshop @ NeurIPS 2021
• Jihong serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2022
• Master student Chia-Yu Tsai (co-supervised with Prof. Jens Kober) graduated with 8.5/10! Congrats!
• Our workshop on Robotic Manipulation of Deformable Objects in Real-world Applications (RoMaDO-RA) was accepted at IROS’21.
• Our Special Issue proposal on Robotic Handling of Deformable Objects is accepted at RA-L, where I am the lead guest editor.
• new journal paper
  P. Zhou, J. Zhu. S. Huo and D. Navarro-Alarcon LaSeSOM: A Latent and Semantic Representation Framework for Soft Object Manipulation IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 5381-5388, 2021.
• new journal paper
  J. Zhu, D. Navarro-Alarcon, R. Passama and A. Cherubini. Vision-based Manipulation of Deformable and Rigid Objects Using Subspace Projections of 2D Contours Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), vol. 142, pp. 103798, 2021.
• Jihong serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2021

Visitors