Portrait of Botao He

Botao He

Ph.D. student in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park

Research Intern, Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics Team

Email CV Google Scholar GitHub

I build robots that learn through physical interaction, and the real-world systems that make that learning work.

I am on the job market for full-time research scientist roles in robot learning. Feel free to reach out. botao@umd.edu

Bio

Welcome! I am a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Research Intern at the Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics Team.

My research focuses on dexterous manipulation and interactive autonomy. I am especially interested in how robots can learn, plan, and adapt through physical interaction with the real world.

At the University of Maryland, I am a member of the Perception and Robotics Group, advised by Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos and Dr. Cornelia Fermüller. At the Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics Team, I work with Prof. Ruoshi Liu, Prof. Haozhi Qi, Dr. Akash Sharma Prof. Jiayuan Mao, as part of DexHand team led by Prof. Jitendra Malik . I also collaborate with Dr. Ji Zhang at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, I was a research intern at Honda Research Institute USA and a visiting student in Prof. Fei Gao's FAST Lab at Zhejiang University.

I open source much of my research. Please visit my Github or email me if you would like to discuss the work.

Selected Publications

For a complete publication list, please see Google Scholar.

Dexterity from Supervised Play
Botao He, Yiming Dou, Yiannis Aloimonos, Jitendra Malik, Akash Sharma, Ruoshi Liu.
arXiv coming soon.
Learn dexterity from minutes of goal-agnostic human play.

ForceBand: Learning Forceful Manipulation with sEMG
Botao He, Zhi Wang, Linna Kuang, Ishaan Ghosh, Jitendra Malik, Cornelia Fermüller, Tingfan Wu, Jiayuan Mao, Ruoshi Liu, Haozhi Qi, Yiannis Aloimonos.
CoRL 2026.
Bring force into human data with EMG, for forceful manipulation.

Website Paper Code

FEEL (Force-Enhanced Egocentric Learning): A Dataset for Physical Action Understanding
Eadom Dessalene, Botao He, Michael Maynord, Yonatan Tussa, Pavan Mantripragada, Yianni Karabatis, Nirupam Roy, Yiannis Aloimonos.
ECCV 2026, Long Oral (25/10,473 submissions).

Website Paper
HumanEgo learning pipeline from human video to robot behavior

HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos
Zhi Wang, Botao He, Kelin Yu, Seungjae Lee, Ruohan Gao, Furong Huang, Yiannis Aloimonos.
Preprint.
IROS 2026 WORLDS Workshop Best Paper.

Website Paper Code Data

Interactive-FAR: Interactive, Fast and Adaptable Routing for Navigation among Movable Obstacles in Complex Unknown Environments
Botao He*, Guofei Chen*, Wenshan Wang, Ji Zhang, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos.
IROS, 2024.

Website Paper Code
Microsaccade-inspired event camera and reconstructed scene

Microsaccade-Inspired Event Camera for Robotics
Botao He, Ze Wang, Yuan Zhou, Jingxi Chen, Chahat Deep Singh, Haojia Li, Yuman Gao, Shaojie Shen, Kaiwei Wang, Yanjun Cao, Chao Xu, Yiannis Aloimonos, Fei Gao, Cornelia Fermüller.
Science Robotics, 2024.

Paper Pre-print Code

NavMoE: Hybrid Model- and Learning-based Traversability Estimation for Local Navigation via Mixture of Experts
Botao He*, Amir Hossein Shahidzadeh*, Yu Chen*, Jiayi Wu, Tianrui Guan, Guofei Chen, Dinesh Manocha, Howie Choset, Glen Chou, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos.
ICRA, 2025.

Paper

Air-FAR: Fast and Adaptable Routing for Aerial Navigation in Large-scale Complex Unknown Environments
Botao He, Guofei Chen, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos, Ji Zhang.
ICRA, 2025.

Website Paper Code

* Equal contribution.

Experiences

  • Amazon Frontier AI & Robotics Team Jan 2026 – Present
    Research Intern
    Robot learning for force-aware dexterous manipulation.
  • University of Maryland Aug 2022 – Present
    PhD Student in Computer Science
    Perception and Robotics Group.
  • Honda Research Institute USA May – Aug 2025
    Research Intern
    Robust motion prediction and mixture-of-experts navigation.
  • Carnegie Mellon University 2023 – 2025
    Research Collaboration
    Interactive navigation and field autonomy with Ji Zhang.
  • Zhejiang University Feb 2020 – Aug 2022
    Visiting Student
    FAST Lab, advised by Fei Gao.
  • Nanjing Institute of Technology Sep 2018 – Jul 2022
    B.Eng. in Robotics

Robot Systems I Built with Friends

ForceBand wrist-band sensing hardware
ForceBand
Wearable sEMG hardware for capturing muscle and motion signals during forceful manipulation.
AirDev aerial autonomy development environment
AirDev
A full-stack aerial autonomy development environment with 29 simulation environments.
Interactive-FAR navigation system
Interactive-FAR
Interactive navigation among movable obstacles in complex unknown environments.
Air-FAR aerial navigation system
Air-FAR
Fast and adaptable aerial routing in large-scale complex unknown environments.
Microsaccade-inspired event camera
Microsaccade-Inspired Event Camera
An actuated sensing system that reveals static scene structure for event cameras.
GPA-Teleoperation aerial robot system
GPA-Teleoperation
Gaze-enhanced, perception-aware assistive aerial teleoperation.
Whole-body multicopter motion planning
UAV Agile Flight System
Whole-body, optimization-based real-time motion planning for multicopters.
Lightweight quadruped robot
Lightweight Quadruped Robot
A lightweight quadruped mechanism designed and built during undergraduate study.
Electromagnetic robotic throwing system
Electromagnetic Throw System
An autonomous system for target detection, depth estimation, and projectile planning.