Fan Zhang

I am a senior research scientist and a project leader at Honda Research Institute EU. I am also a visiting researcher at Imperial College London. I was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow funded by Schmidt Futures. I received my Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London (advised by Prof. Yiannis Demiris).

My research interests cover many aspects of machine learning algorithms applied to general robot manipulation. My research has been accepted at Science Robotics and T-RO. I have been awarded The UK Best PhD in Robotics Award 2020 1st place held by Queen Mary, and Best Research Paper (Early Career Researcher), 2025 AI & Robotics Research Awards held by TAS Hub, Responsible Ai UK and the Royal Society.


CV     Github     G. Scholar     LinkedIn     Twitter

Some recent highlights from our research:

Affordance-based Robot Manipulation with Flow Matching

Fan Zhang, Michael Gienger
★ Hugging Face 🤗 LeRobot PushT task integration in progress ★
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Code

Learning garment manipulation policies toward robot-assisted dressing

Fan Zhang, Yiannis Demiris
Science Robotics, 2022
★ Best Research Paper (Early Career Researcher), 2025 AI & Robotics Research Awards, held by TAS Hub, Responsible Ai UK and the Royal Society ★
Webpage  •   Paper  •   Video  •   Code

Probabilistic Real-Time User Posture Tracking for Personalized Robot-Assisted Dressing

Fan Zhang, Antoine Cully, Yiannis Demiris
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2019
★ The Queen Mary UK Best PhD in Robotics Award 2020 1st place ★
Paper  •   Video  •   Code

Self-Supervised Learning for Automated Multi-Modal Dance Performance Assessment

Yun Zhong, Fan Zhang, Yiannis Demiris
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023
Paper  •   Video  •   Code

CCDP: Composition of Conditional Diffusion Policies with Guided Sampling

Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon, Michael Gienger, and Fan Zhang
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025, under review
Webpage  •   Paper

Visual-Tactile Learning of Garment Unfolding for Robot-Assisted Dressing

Fan Zhang, Yiannis Demiris
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023
Paper  •   Video  •   Code

Grasp-oriented Fine-grained Cloth Segmentation without Real Supervision

Ruijie Ren, Mohit Gurnani Rajesh, Jordi Sanchez-Riera, Adrian Lopez-Rodriguez, Fan Zhang, Yurun Tian, Guillem Alenyà, Antonio Agudo, Yiannis Demiris, Krystian Mikolajczyk, Francesc Moreno-Noguer
International Conference on Machine Vision and Applications, 2023
Paper

Learning Grasping Points for Garment Manipulation in Robot-Assisted Dressing

Fan Zhang, Yiannis Demiris
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020
Paper  •   Video  •   Code

Preoperative Optimization of the Surgical Robot considering Internal Diversity of Workspace

Zhiyuan Yan, Zhijiang Du, Fan Zhang, Weidong Wang
Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 2018
Paper

Personalized Robot-Assisted Dressing using User Modeling in Latent Spaces

Fan Zhang, Yiannis Demiris
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017
Paper  •   Video  •   Code

Preoperative Planning for the Multi-Arm Surgical Robot using PSO-GP-based Performance Optimization

Fan Zhang, Zhiyuan Yan, Zhijang Du
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017
Paper

Preoperative setup planning for robotic surgery based on a simulation platform and Gaussian process

Fan Zhang, Zhiyuan Yan, Zhijang Du
IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA), 2016
★ Best Student Paper Award ★
Paper

An Under-Actuated Manipulation Controller Based on Workspace Analysis and Gaussian Processes

Fan Zhang, Yanyu Su, Xiang Zhang, Wei Dong, Zhijiang Du
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015
Paper  •   Video

2025

Invited Talk, ICRA Workshop on Deformable Object Manipulation

Invited Talk, University of York YorRobots Seminar

Invited Talk, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics IPAB visitor seminar

PhD Annual Review, Autonomous Agents Research Group

Invited Talk, The University of Edinburgh Autonomous Agents Research Group Seminar

Invited Talk, Imperial College London Personal Robotics Lab Seminar

2024

Invited Talk, University of Hamburg Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems (TAMS) Seminar

Organizer, RSS Workshop on Assistive Robots

Organizer, Imperial-X & Schmidt Futures Breaking Topics in AI conference

2023

Invited Talk, King's College London Social AI & Robotics Laboratory Seminar

Invited Talk, Imperial College London AI seminar in Statistics

Organizer, ICRA Workshop on Assistive Manipulation

Involved Projects, MURI Closed-Loop Multisensory Brain-Computer Interface for Enhanced Decision Accuracy

2022

Invited Talk, Tsinghua University Intelligent Robot Seminar (live audience: 150,000)

Invited Talk, Apple Weekly Seminar

Involved Projects, UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node in Trust

Involved Projects, Innovate UK D-RISK Learning Edge Cases for Autonomous Vehicles

2021+

Invited Talk, The Institution of Engineering and Technology Human Motion Analysis for Healthcare Applications

Invited Talk, Imperial College London The Hamlyn Centre

Invited Talk, TechBeat Robot Seminar

Press coverage, Bloomberg, The Times, Daily Mail, Telegraph, NewScientist, TechXplore

Reviewer, RA-L, T-RO, Scientific Reports, ICRA, IROS, RSS, WACV

Reviewer Editor, Frontiers in Robotics and AI-Robot Learning and Evolution

★ Science Robotics, 2022 ★
Learning Garment Manipulation Policies towards Robot-Assisted Dressing
Fan Zhang, Yiannis Demiris

Paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abm6010
Code is here https://github.com/fan6zh/robot_dressing
Please find more details on our website https://fan6zh.github.io/robot-dressing/