Zichao Hu
I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Professor Joydeep Biswas. I graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.Science in Computer Engineering in 2022.
My research focuses on leveraging imitation learning, reinforcement learning, LLMs, and diffusion models to empower autonomous robots to understand and carry out human instructions while navigating safely and in compliance with social norms within human environments.
I currently serve as the Workflow Chair for AAAI 2026 and am part of the Learning Directed Operating System (LDOS) project, an NSF CISE Expedition in Computing.
Selected Publications († ⇒ equal contribution)
Social Robot Navigation
ComposableNav: Instruction-Following Navigation in Dynamic Environments via Composable Diffusion
Zichao Hu, Chen Tang, Michael J. Munje, Yifeng Zhu, Alex Liu, Shuijing Liu, Garrett Warnell, Peter Stone, Joydeep Biswas
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2025)
Paper / Project Website
SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigation
Michael J. Munje1, Chen Tang, Shuijing Liu, Zichao Hu, Yifeng Zhu, Jiaxun Cui, Garrett Warnell, Joydeep Biswas, Peter Stone
Conference (CoRL 2025)
Paper / Project Website
Rethinking Social Robot Navigation: Leveraging the Best of Two Worlds
Amir Hossain Raj†, Zichao Hu†, Haresh Karnan, Rohan Chandra, Amirreza Payandeh, Luisa Mao, Peter Stone, Joydeep Biswas, Xuesu Xiao
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024). Joint first Author.
Paper
LLMs for Robot Code Generation
Robo-Instruct: Simulator-Augmented Instruction Alignment For Finetuning CodeLLMs
Zichao Hu, Junyi Jessy Li, Arjun Guha, Joydeep Biswas
Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2025)
Paper / Project Website
Deploying and Evaluating LLMs to Program Service Mobile Robots
Zichao Hu, Francesca Lucchetti, Claire Schlesinger, Yash Saxena, Anders Freeman, Sadanand Modak, Arjun Guha, Joydeep Biswas
Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L 2024)
Paper / Project Website
SLAM
SoMaSLAM: 2D Graph SLAM for Sparse Range Sensing with Soft Manhattan World Constraints
Jeahn Han, Zichao Hu, Seonmo Yang, Minji Kim, Pyojin Kim
Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L 2025)
Paper / Video
Efficient 2D Graph SLAM for Sparse Sensing
Hanzhi Zhou†, Zichao Hu†, Sihang Liu, Samira Khan
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022). Joint first Author.
Paper / Video