Panpan CAI (蔡盼盼)

I am a roboticist. I am currently a Full-time Faculty at the Shanghai Innovation Institute, and an Associate Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral research fellow with Prof. David Hsu at the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. I received my PhD from Nanyang Technological University.

I work on large-scale decision making for robots in open, complex, and dynamic environments — bridging explicit planning with learning and foundation models to enable robots to operate smoothly in complex environments and interact seamlessly with humans. Current topics include foundation models for robot planning, integrating planning and learning, open-world robot planning, mobile manipulation for home-service robots, and autonomous driving.

I serve as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), and have served as Associate Editor for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023) and the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2023). I am Area Chair of RSS 2026 and Organization Chair of CEAI 2024 in China. My LEADER paper was a Best Paper Award Finalist at CoRL 2022, and my self-designed graduate course on autonomous driving was honored with the SJTU University-Level Outstanding Course Award.