Botao He | Home

Bio

Welcome! I am currently a CS Ph.D. student at PRG (Perception and Robotics Group), University of Maryland - College Park, advised by Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos and Dr. Cornelia Fermuller. I am also working with Dr. Ji Zhang in CMU. Formerly I was a visiting student in Fast Lab, Zhejiang University (ZJU), advised by Prof. Fei Gao.

My research interests are Interactive Perception & Learning & Motion Planning for Manipulation and Navigation. I am especially interested in systematic solutions that make the robot system actually work in field scenarios. I hope to build a useful robot that can actually improve someone's life.

I open source most of my research, please check my Github for more infomation.
If any repository does not work for you, please report an issue or drop me an email. If it does not work at all, please kick me.

If you are interested in my research or would like to have a talk, feel free to drop me an email.

Selected Publications

All publications on Google Scholar.

	Adversarial Game-Theoretic Algorithm for Dexterous Grasp Synthesis Yu Chen, Botao He, Yuemin Mao, Arthur Jakobsson, Jeffrey Ke, Yiannis Aloimonos, Guanya Shi, Howie Choset, Jiayuan Mao, Jeffrey Ichnowski. Under review Video
	NavMoE: Hybrid Model- and Learning-based Traversability Estimation for Local Navigation via Mixture of Experts Botao He, Amir Hossein Shahidzadeh, Yu Chen*, Jiayi Wu, Tianrui Guan, Guofei Chen, Dinesh Manocha, Howie Choset, Glen Chou, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos. Under review Paper Video
	Air-FAR: Fast and Adaptable Routing for Aerial Navigation in Large-scale Complex Unknown Environments Botao He, Guofei Chen, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos, Ji Zhang. ICRA 2025 Website Paper Code
	Interactive-FAR: Interactive, Fast and Adaptable Routing for Navigation Among Movable Obstacles in Complex Unknown Environments Botao He, Guofei Chen, Wenshan Wang, Ji Zhang, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos. IROS 2024 Website Paper Video Code
	Microsaccade-inspired Event Camera for Robotics Botao He, Ze Wang, Yuan Zhou, Jingxi Chen, Chahat Deep Singh, Haojia Li, Yuman Gao, Shaojie Shen, Kaiwei Wang, Yanjun Cao, Chao Xu, Yiannis Aloimonos, Fei Gao and Cornelia Fermuller. Science Robotics Website Paper Pre-print Video Code
	GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation Qianhao Wang, Botao He, Zhiren Xun and Fei Gao. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2022). Website Paper Video Code
	FAST-Dynamic-Vision: Detection and Tracking Dynamic Objects with Event and Depth Sensing Botao He, Haojia Li, Siyuan Wu, Dong Wang, Zhiwei Zhang, Qianli Dong, Chao Xu, and Fei Gao IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2021). Website Paper Video Code

Experiences

Honda Research Institute USA May, 2025 - Aug, 2025

Research Intern
Advised by Dr. David Isele.
Carnegie Mellon University May, 2023 - NOW

Visiting Student
Advised by Prof. Ji Zhang.
University of Maryland Sep, 2022 - NOW

Ph.D. Student in Computer Science
PRG (Perception & Robotics Group). Advised by Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos and Dr. Cornelia Fermuller.
Zhejiang University Feb, 2020 - Aug, 2022

Visiting Student
FAST (Field Autonomous System & compuTing) Lab. Advised by Prof. Fei Gao.
Nanjing Institute of Technology Sep, 2018 - June, 2022

Undergraduate
Major in Robot Engineering.

Robot Systems I Built with Friends

AirDev: Aerial Autonomy Development Environment
A full-stack autonomy development environment for aerial robots. Support 30+ large-scale environments with multiple sensor setups.

Microsaccade-inspired Event Camera
A systematic solution that makes event camera maintain rich and stable texture information.

Gaze-enhanced Advanced Pilot Assistance System
A gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, making drone operation easy for everyone.

Event-based Dynamic Objact Avoidance System
Perception involving depth and event sensing, with low latency and high precision.

UAV Agile Flight System
A full-body, optimization-based, yaw-considered real-time motion planning framework for aerial robots.

Light-weight Quadruped Robot
A light-weight quadruped designed and built in fresh year.

Electromagnetic Throw System
A throw system that is able to automunously find the target, estimate target's depth and calculate parabola.

Challenge Arena Fighting Robot
An autonomous robot with ability to move over terrains, detect and attack the opponent autonomously.