Adaptive Robotics Lab

Welcome to the Adaptive Robotics Lab at UIC!

We aim to develop fundamental technologies that enable robots to understand their contacts with the external world from proactive interactions and perform meaningful tasks. Our research topics include physics-based perception/world modeling, active learning, and contact-rich manipulation planning. Applications of our research include construction, nursing, healthcare, and scientific exploration.

news

Sep 17, 2025 Prof. Yifan Zhu gave a talk at the Utah Robotics Seminar!
Aug 16, 2025 Our lab is officially launched at UIC, with two PhD students Juneil Park and Fuquan Wang!

selected publications

  1. Science Robotics
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    Forces for Free: Vision-Based Contact Force Estimation with a Compliant Hand
    Yifan Zhu*, Mei Hao*, Xupeng Zhu*, and 3 more authors
    Science Robotics, 2025
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  2. RA-L
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    One-Shot Real-to-Sim via End-to-End Differentiable Simulation and Rendering
    Yifan Zhu, Tianyi Xiang, Aaron Dollar, and 1 more author
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025
    arXiv PDF Code Website
  3. IJSR
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    Immersive Commodity Telepresence with the Avatrina Robot Avatar
    J. M. Correia*, P. Naughton*and J.C. Peng*, Yifan Zhu*, and 7 more authors
    International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), 2024
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  4. R:SS
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    Few-shot Adaptation for Manipulating Granular Materials under Domain Shift
    Yifan Zhu*, P. Thangeda*, Melkior Ornik, and 1 more author
    In Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS), 2023
    arXiv Website
  5. ICRA
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    A Data-driven Approach for Fast Simulation of Robot Locomotion on Granular Media
    Yifan Zhu, Laith Abdulmajeid, and Kris Hauser
    In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019
    PDF