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PhD Candidate · Autonomous Systems & Perception Lab
ETH Zürich
Investigating the intersection of 3D scene understanding and dexterous robotic manipulation. Focused on building systems that generalise to novel objects and cluttered workspaces without dense human supervision.
My work bridges geometry-aware perception and contact-rich control — asking how a robot can form an accurate model of the world quickly enough to act on it gracefully.
My current focus spans four interconnected areas:
I am particularly interested in how sparse, geometry-aware representations can enable robust grasping and placement in scenes the robot has never encountered — closing the gap between controlled lab settings and real deployment without exhaustive re-training.
An investigation into neural implicit shape representations for estimating the 6-DoF pose of previously unseen object instances at category level. The goal is a manipulation pipeline that requires no CAD model and fewer than ten reference views to achieve reliable pick-and-place in clutter.
Papers & Preprints
“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.”
Good tools lower the cost of good thinking. My stack is deliberately small.
I am open to research collaborations, conversations about robotic manipulation, or a well-placed recommendation for a good monograph.
Reach me at hello@oneoneliu.lol.