Ruiqi Wang
Hello!
I'm a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, where I work in the Smart Machine And Robotics Technology (SMART) Lab with Professor Byung-Cheol Min.
My research goal is to facilitate the seamless integration of robots into unstructured, human-centered environments: from assistive service in homes to collaborative operations in the field.
To this end, my research centers on developing interactive and data-driven learning methods that enable robots to learn from and adapt to human-centered dynamics across three key dimensions:
Capability Heterogeneity
How to optimize human–robot teaming by accounting for inherent yet diverse human capabilities (e.g., cognitive abilities, skill levels, backgrounds) and robot characteristics (e.g., mobility, sensing, autonomy) within specific task contexts?
State Uncertainty
How to enable proactive perception and responsiveness to human states (e.g., cognitive load, attention, trust), robot working conditions, and task status that evolve dynamically during operation?
Preference Variability
How to align robot interactive patterns with individual preferences through continuous, multimodal human feedback?
Spanning scales from one-to-one human-robot interaction to team-level coordination in multi-human multi-robot teams, my work aims to lay the foundation for a future where robots can naturally understand, adapt to, and collaborate with any human, in any context or situation.
Research Areas:
News
- Sep 18 PRIMT accepted as Oral (Top 0.35%) at NeurIPS 2025!
- Jun 15 Two papers accepted at IROS 2025!
- Feb 10 Paper on Multimodal Audio-based Disease Prediction accepted at IEEE/ACM T-ASLP!
- Jan 27 Three papers (including one RA-L transfer) accepted at ICRA 2025!
- Jan 06 PrefCLM accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
- Dec 16 Arjun (mentored undergrad) won First Place at Purdue Fall Undergraduate Research Expo!
- Dec 13 Passed my Ph.D. dissertation proposal defense! 🎉
- Nov 26 Cognitive Load-based Affective Workload Allocation accepted at IEEE T-HMS!
- Jul 10 MOCAS Dataset accepted at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing!
- May 02 Passed my Ph.D. preliminary exam!
- Feb 05 Attention-enhanced Hierarchical RL for Task Assignment accepted at IEEE RA-L!
- Jan 28 SAMARL accepted at ICRA 2024!
- Jan 17 Husformer accepted at IEEE T-CDS! [Code]
- Dec 28 Conducted robotics seminar at West Lafayette Jr./Sr. High School.
- Jun 21 Two papers accepted at IROS 2023: ITA-AtRL and NaviSTAR!
- May 27 Conducted five-day robotics outreach program for K-12 students.
- Dec 18 Held outreach event at Macau Anglican College.
- Jun 30 Feedback-efficient Active Preference Learning accepted at IROS 2022!