Hello! I am a PhD student, advised by Professor Lantao Liu, in the Intelligent Systems Engineering department at Indiana University Bloomington. I am a member of Vehicle Autonomy and Intelligence Lab (VAIL).

My research interests include perception, deep learning and autonomous navigation in robotics domain.

• Perception is to understand the surrounding environments using certain sensor measurements, e.g., point clouds or images. I have been working on developing geometric-based methods to process Point Clouds (RA-L) and Images (ICRA’21) such that the perception information could be efficiently and robustly utilized for planning during the mission.
• Deep Learning is an extremely important learning-based method for solving preception problems. Applications of deep learning in robotics are strictly limited due to the availability of training data. I have been working on developing models with Unsupervised-learning-based paradigm (NeurIPS’21-ML4AD, submitted to ICRA’22) and with Domain Adaptation (Ongoing work) for constructing navigable space and extracting semantic information.
• Autonomous Navigation is a fundamental capability for deploying mobile robots in the real world. I have been working on developing methods for Visual Navigation (submitted to ICRA’22) and Exploration (ArXiv).

You can find my CV here.

Publications

Kernel-based Diffusion Approximated Markov Decision Processes for Off-Road Autonomous Navigation and Control
Junhong Xu, Kai Yin, Zheng Chen, Jason M. Gregory, Ethan A. Stump, Lantao Liu.
[pdf]

Polyline Based Generative Navigable Space Segmentation for Autonomous Visual Navigation
Zheng Chen, Zhengming Ding, David Crandall, Lantao Liu. submitted to ICRA’22.
[pdf] [bibtex] [supplementary] [slide]

NSS-VAEs: Generative Scene Decomposition for Visual Navigable Space Construction
Zheng Chen, Lantao Liu. NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving.
[pdf] [bibtex] [video] [slide]

Efficient Map Prediction via Low-Rank Matrix Completion
Zheng Chen, Shi Bai, Lantao Liu. 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. ICRA’21
[pdf] [bibtex] [supplementary] [presentation] [slide]

Multi-Objective Autonomous Exploration on Real-Time Continuous Occupancy Maps
Zheng Chen, Weizhe Chen, Shi Bai, Lantao Liu. ArXiv.
[pdf] [bibtex] [video]

Navigable Space Construction from Sparse Noisy Point Clouds
Zheng Chen, Lantao Liu. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 6.3 (2021). RA-L
[pdf] [bibtex] [supplementary] [presentation] [slide]

A Visual Feature based Obstacle Avoidance Method for Autonomous Navigation
Zheng Chen, Malintha Fernando, Lantao Liu. 2019 IEEE Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition Workshop (AIPR). AIPR’19
[pdf] [bibtex]

Services

• Reviewer for IROS2021, ICRA2022
• Teaching assistant for ENGR E511 Machine Learning for Signal Processing, 2020 Spring
• Project mentor for students in New Albany High School