Haonan Chen

I am a postdoc at Harvard, where I am fortunate to be advised by Yilun Du. Previously, I was a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was fortunate to be advised by Katie Driggs-Campbell and was fortunate to work closely with Yunzhu Li.

My research focuses on composable multimodal robot learning for robotic manipulation. I develop structured models that help robots reason about the physical world and learn from heterogeneous data sources, including simulation, teleoperation, human video, and off-policy data.

I'm actively seeking collaborations in composable robot learning, multi-modal manipulation, and learning from heterogeneous data sources. If you're interested in these topics, I'd love to chat with you!

Email / CV / Google Scholar / Twitter

News

To junior PhD/master/undergraduate students: If you’d like to chat about life, career plans, or research ideas in ML/robotics, please feel free to email me to schedule a meeting. I dedicate 30 minutes each week for these conversations and encourage students from underrepresented groups or anyone in need to reach out.
[2025/10] I will give a talk at Computational Robotics Lab at Harvard
[2025/06] I gave a talk at Professor Jiajun Wu's Lab at Stanford
[2025/05] Co-organizing the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Learning Meets Model-Based Methods for Contact-Rich Manipulation
[2025/04] I gave a talk at Professor Animashree Anandkumar's Lab at Caltech
[2025/04] I gave a talk at Professor Katerina Fragkiadaki's Lab at Carnegie Mellon University
[2025/06] I gave a talk at Tacta Systems
[2025/05] I gave a talk at Professor Roberto Martín-Martín's Lab at UT Austin
[2025/05] I gave an outreach talk to Grade 5 Students at St. Matthew Catholic School
[2025/03] I gave a talk at Safe AI Lab at Carnegie Mellon University
[2025/03] I gave a talk at Parasol Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Publications

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	Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensus Haonan Chen, Jiaming Xu, Hongyu Chen, Kaiwen Hong, Binghao Huang, Chaoqi Liu, Jiayuan Mao, Yunzhu Li, Yilun Du⁺, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell⁺ * Equal contribution, ⁺ Equal advising [Project] [Paper] [Code] [Dataset]
	Tool-as-Interface: Learning Robot Policies from Observing Human Tool Use Haonan Chen, Cheng Zhu, Shuijing Liu, Yunzhu Li, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell CoRL 2025, [Project] [Paper] [Code] Best Paper Award at ICRA 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models and Neuro-Symbolic AI for Robotics [Link] Best Presentation Award at CSL Student Conference 2025 [Link] Featured in Video Friday on [IEEE Spectrum] Media Coverage: [The Grainger College of Engineering], [TechXplore], [Hackster.io]
	Towards Uncertainty Unification: A Case Study for Preference Learning Shaoting Peng, Haonan Chen, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell RSS 2025, [Paper]
	Learning Coordinated Bimanual Manipulation Policies using State Diffusion and Inverse Dynamics Models Haonan Chen, Jiaming Xu, Lily Sheng, Tianchen Ji, Shuijing Liu, Yunzhu Li, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell ICRA 2025, [Project] [Paper]
	Cooperative Advisory Residual Policies for Congestion Mitigation Aamir Hasan, Neeloy Chakraborty, Haonan Chen, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell JATS 2024, [Paper]
	Lessons in Cooperation: A Qualitative Analysis of Driver Sentiments towards real-time Advisory Systems through a Focus Group User Study Aamir Hasan, Neeloy Chakraborty, Haonan Chen, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell ITSM 2024, [Paper]
	Predicting Object Interactions with Behavior Primitives: An Application in Stowing Tasks Haonan Chen, Yilong Niu, Kaiwen Hong, Shuijing Liu, Yiqing Wang, Yunzhu Li, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell CoRL 2023, [Project] [Paper] Finalist - Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards
	Towards Safety of Multi-Level Human-Robot Interaction in Industrial Tasks Zhe Huang, Yeji Mun, Haonan Chen, Yiqing Xie, Yilong Niu, Xiang Li, Ninghan Zhong, Haoyuan You, Daniel L. McPherson, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell CASE 2023 (Special Session)
	Learning Task Skills and Goals Simultaneously from Physical Interaction Haonan Chen, Yeji Mun, Zhe Huang, Yilong Niu, Yiqing Xie, D. Livingston McPherson, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell CASE 2023 (Special Session)
	PeRP: Personalized Residual Policies For Congestion Mitigation Through Co-operative Advisory Systems Aamir Hasan, Neeloy Chakraborty, Haonan Chen, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell ITSC 2023, [Paper] [Website] Best Presentation Award at CSL Student Conference 2024
	Combining Model-Based Controllers and Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning for Traffic Simulation Haonan Chen, Tianchen Ji, Shuijing Liu, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell ITSC 2022, [Paper]
	Learning to Navigate Intersections with Unsupervised Driver Trait Inference Shuijing Liu, Peixin Chang, Haonan Chen, Neeloy Chakraborty, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell ICRA 2022, [Paper] [Website] [Video]
	Robot Sound Interpretation: Combining Sight and Sound in Learning-Based Control Peixin Chang, Shuijing Liu, Haonan Chen, and Katherine Driggs-Campbell IROS 2020, [Paper] [Video]

Awards and Honors

Conference Travel Award, Graduate College, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2023
Finalist - Best Paper/Best Student Paper Awards, Conference on Robot Learning 2023
Bronze Tablet Award, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2020
Excellent Graduate, Zhejiang University 2020
Student Speaker at Graduation, ZJU-UIUC Institute 2020
Provincial Government Scholarship, Zhejiang Province, China (Top 3%) 2019
Dean's List, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2019
National Scholarship, China (Top 1.8%) 2018
Excellent Undergraduate Scholarship, Zhejiang University (Top 3%) 2018-2019
Academic Excellence Scholarship Award, ZJU-UIUC Institute 2017-2019
Top Ten Social Practice, Zhejiang University (Top 1.5%) 2017

Service and Leadership

Robotics Seminar @ Illinois
Organizer August 2023 - May 2025
Coordinated Science Laboratory Student Conference
Organizer 2024

Professional Service

Session Chair:
- CASE - IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, 2023
Reviewer:
- CoRL - Conference on Robot Learning
- ICRA - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
- ICLR - International Conference on Learning Representations
- RA-L - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
- ITSC - IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems
- CASE - IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering

Extra-Curricular Service

Founding Team Leader, Robotic Team for RoboMaster Challenge, ZJU-UIUC Institute 10/2017 - 06/2018

Thanks Jon Barron for this amazing template.