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Panpan Cai

Associate Professor

Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU)

Biography

I am a roboticist. I am currently an associate professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China. Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral research fellow supervised by Prof. David Hsu at the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore. I received my PhD degree from the Nanyang Technological University. I have been focusing on tackling large-scale decision making problems in robotics that involve complex environments, uncertainties and long-term planning. My research interests include robot motion planning, decision making, robot learning, parallel computing, and their applications to autonomous driving in crowded environments. My goal is to enable robots to seamlessly interact with humans in crowded, chaotic environments and accomplish complex tasks. Please see this video for a 3-min introduction of my recent research, or see my research statement and CV for details.

Interests

  • Robot planning and decision making
  • Robot learning
  • Integrate planning and learning
  • Autonomous driving in crowed traffic
  • Parallel computing

Education

  • PhD in Robotics, 2016

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  • Bsc in Computational Mathematics, 2011

    ChuKoChen Honors College, Zhejiang University, China

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Associate Professor

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Aug 2022 – Present Shanghai, China

Research topics:

  • Integrating planning and learning
  • Planning under uncertainty
  • Autonomous driving
  • Robot manipulation
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Research fellow

National University of Singapore

Dec 2021 – Jan 2022 Singapore

Research topics:

  • Integrating planning and learning
  • Behaviour modeling of traffic agents
 
 
 
 
 

Research fellow

National University of Singapore

Feb 2017 – Dec 2021 Singapore

Research topics:

  • Autonomous driving in crowded environments
  • Behaviour modeling of traffic agents
  • Massive parallelization for real-time planning under uncertainty
  • Integrating planning and learning for large-scale decision making under uncertainty.
 
 
 
 
 

PhD

Nanyang Technological University

Aug 2011 – Dec 2016 Singapore

Research topics:

  • GPU-based collision detection in complex environments
  • Massively parallel path planning in complex industrial environments
 
 
 
 
 

Undergraduate student

Zhejiang University

Aug 2007 – Jun 2011 China

Specifications:

  • Top students selected to the ChuKoChen Honors College.
  • Trained on Mathematics and Scientific Computing.

Talks

GAMMA presented at ICRA 2022

A spotlight talk given at ICRA 2022 for the paper “GAMMA. A General Agent Motion Model for Autonomous Driving”

Research talk at RSS pioneer 2020

A spotlight talk given at RSS pioneer 2020 that summarizes my research

SUMMIT presented at ICRA 2020

A spotlight talk given at ICRA 2020 for the paper “SUMMIT. A Simulator for Urban Driving in Massive Mixed Traffic”

LeTS-Drive presented at RSS 2019

A spotlight talk given at RSS 2019 for the paper “LeTS-Drive. Driving in a crowd by learning from tree search”

HyP-DESPOT presented at RSS 2018

A splotlight talk at RSS 2018 that introduces the paper “HyP-DESPOT. A hybrid parallel algorithm for online planning under …

Publications

(2019). Context and Intention Aware Planning for Urban Driving. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

Contact

  • COM1-01-12, 13 Computing Drive, 117417, Singapore
  • 9:00 to 18:00
  • Skype Me