Zhuo Li | 李卓

I love humanoid robots, but I break them quite often...

About Me

Hi there! I am a third-year Ph.D. student in CLOVER lab at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). I obtained my master's degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). I collaborated with Prof. Sylvain Calinon and Prof. Darwin G. Caldwell during my Ph.D. study. I was previously an intern at UBTECH Robotics.

My long-term goal is to develop general-purpose humanoid assistants that can understand, adapt, and evolve alongside humans. I am always happy to chat or collaborate with people with different backgrounds. If you are interested in my work, please feel free to reach out!

Research Interests

My current research focuses on embodied intelligence and manipulation skill learning for humanoid robots, aiming to enable them to perform complex tasks in unstructured environments, particularly in domestic settings. I work at the intersection of imitation learning, reinforcement learning, foundation models, and robotics, with an emphasis on dexterous grasping, bimanual coordination, and whole-body motion generation.

Selected Publications

*Equal Contribution, †Project Lead, ⟊Equal Advising Highlights

Peer-Reviewed Journals

Language-Guided Dexterous Functional Grasping by LLM Generated Grasp Functionality and Synergy for Humanoid Manipulation
Zhuo Li, Junjia Liu, Zhihao Li , Zhipeng Dong , Tao Teng , Yongsheng Ou , Darwin Caldwell , and Fei Chen
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE), 2025
Paper / Video

A LLM-based DFG framework that can synthesize versatile dexterous functional grasps from language instructions and achieve open-set generalization on novel functional concepts.

Human–Humanoid Robots’ Cross-Embodiment Behavior-Skill Transfer Using Decomposed Adversarial Learning From Demonstration:
Junjia Liu, Zhuo Li , Minghao Yu , Zhipeng Dong , Sylvain Calinon , Darwin Caldwell , and Fei Chen
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine (RAM), 2025
Paper

A transferable framework that reduces the data bottleneck by using a unified digital human model as a common prototype and bypassing the need for retraining on every new humanoid platform

Planning Multi-fingered Grasps with Reachability Awareness in Unrestricted Workspace
Zhuo Li, Shiqi Li, Ke Han, Xiao Li, Youjun Xiong & Zheng Xie
Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems , 2023
Paper / Video

A reachability-aware multi-fingered grasp planning framework for humanoid manipulation that can synthesize feasible high-DOF grasps for novel objects in unrestricted workspace.

Human-like redundancy resolution: An integrated inverse kinematics scheme for anthropomorphic manipulators with radial elbow offset
Shiqi Li, Ke Han, Zhuo Li, Yizhang Liu, Youjun Xiong
Advanced Engineering Informatics, 2022
Paper / Video

An integrated scheme for solving the path-wise IK problem of a 7-DoF AMREO in the position domain.

Journals in Review

Towards Deploying VLA without Fine-Tuning: Plug-and-Play Inference-Time VLA Policy Steering via Embodied Evolutionary Diffusion
Zhuo Li, Junjia Liu, Zhipeng Dong, Tao Teng, Quentin Rouxel, Darwin Caldwell, Fei Chen
In Submission to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), 2025
Paper / Video / Project Website

An novel plug-and-play inference-time policy steering method that enables zero-shot deployment of pre-trained VLA policies without any additional fine-tuning or data collection.

Peer-Reviewed Conference Papers

ManiDP: Manipulability-Aware Diffusion Policy for Posture-Dependent Bimanual Manipulation
Zhuo Li, Junjia Liu, Dianxi Li, Tao Teng, Miao Li, Sylvain Calinon, Darwin Caldwell, Fei Chen
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025
Paper / Video

We propose Manipulability-Aware Diffusion Policy (ManiDP), a novel imitation learning method that not only generates plausible bimanual trajectories, but also optimizes dual-arm configurations to better satisfy posture-dependent task requirements.

Instruction-following Long-horizon Manipulation by LLM-Empowered Symbolic Planner
Zhihao Li, Junjia Liu, Zhuo Li, Minghao Yu, Tao Teng, Shunbo Zhou, Miao Li, Tin Lun Lam, and Fei Chen
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), 2024
Paper

A generalizable framework that combines a Large Language Model, a Visual-language Model, and symbolic planning to address long-horizon bimanual mobile manipulation tasks.

Academic Services

  • Journal Reviewer:
    Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE), Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Robotics & Automation Magazine (RAM), Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS).
  • Conference Reviewer:
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).