Jiuzhou Lei | Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student working on robot learning at Texas A&M University. I received my M.S.E. in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania, where I worked in the GRASP Laboratory on robot perception and multi-robot system for agricultural applications. I received my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Sichuan University.

Research Interests

Robot Learning and Manipulation: I build robots that understand and act in the physical world, with a focus on learning policies whose decisions are explainable and controllable.
Field Robotics: robotic mapping and navigation for agriculture and forestry

News

[2026 July] One paper, in collaboration with our colleagues, on distillation for eliminating unsafe robot behaviors has been accepted to CoRL 2026. See you in Austin!
[2026 June] Our paper on contact-rich manipulation is accepted to IROS 2026.
[2025 Dec] Our paper SlideSLAM is published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).
[2025 July] Our paper on spatio-temporal orchard mapping is published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
[2023 May] I received my M.S.E. in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Publications

IROS

Learning When to See and When to Feel: Adaptive Vision-Torque Fusion for Contact-Aware Manipulation

Jiuzhou Lei, Chang Liu, Yu She, Xiao Liang, Minghui Zheng

IROS, 2026.

PDF Code

Under Review

RoboIRS: Inference-Time Internal Representation Steering for Generalist Robot Policies

Jiuzhou Lei, Chang Liu, Dayou Li, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xiao Liang, Yu She, Zhiwen Fan, Minghui Zheng

arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.04681, 2026.

PDF Code

CoRL

Behavior Uncloning: Distilling Mode Redirection into Policy Weights without Inference-Time Steering

Hao Wang, Jiuzhou Lei, Dayou Li, Bangya Liu, Minghui Zheng, Manling Li, Ruohan Zhang, Zhiwen Fan

CoRL, 2026.

PDF Project Page

T-RO

SlideSLAM: Sparse, Lightweight, Decentralized Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Navigation

Xu Liu*, Jiuzhou Lei*, Ankit Prabhu*, Yuezhan Tao, Igor Spasojevic, Pratik Chaudhari, Nikolay Atanasov, Vijay Kumar (*Equal contribution)

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), vol. 41, pp. 6529-6548, 2025.

PDF Code Project Page

RA-L

Spatio-Temporal Metric-Semantic Mapping for Persistent Orchard Monitoring: Method and Dataset

Jiuzhou Lei, Ankit Prabhu, Xu Liu, Fernando Cladera, Mehrad Mortazavi, Reza Ehsani, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 8610-8617, 2025.

PDF Code Project Page

MSSP

UAVs for Forestry: Metric-Semantic Mapping and Diameter Estimation with Autonomous Aerial Robots

Ankit Prabhu, Xu Liu, Igor Spasojevic, Yuwei Wu, Yifei Shao, Dexter Ong, Jiuzhou Lei, Patrick Corey Green, Pratik Chaudhari, Vijay Kumar

Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (MSSP), vol. 208, p. 111050, 2024.

PDF

arXiv

Learning Actionable Manipulation Recovery via Counterfactual Failure Synthesis

Dayou Li, Jiuzhou Lei, Hao Wang, Lulin Liu, Yunhao Yang, Zihan Wang, Bangya Liu, Minghui Zheng, Zhiwen Fan

arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.13528, 2026.

PDF Project Page

arXiv

ContactWorld: What Matters in Vision-Tactile World Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Zhiyuan Zhang, Pokuang Zhou, Kaidi Zhang, Adeesh Desai, Temitope Amosa, Davood Soleymanzadeh, Jiuzhou Lei, Minghui Zheng, Yu She

arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.13877, 2026.

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