Ruiqi Zhang

Ph.D. Student
Mechanical Eng. & BAIR Lab

University of California Berkeley

About me

Hi, there! I'm the second-year Ph.D. student of High Performance Robotics (HiPeR) Lab @ UC Berkeley under supervision of Prof. Mark W. Mueller with both MechE Department and Berkeley AI Reearch (BAIR) Lab.

Before this, I got my Bachelor's degree in Automotive Engineering, Tongji University. I'm also a long-term researcher of Tongji Embodied AI Lab supervised by Prof. Guang Chen. My research mainly focuses on Robotics, Reinforcement Learning and Computer Vision. I also collaborated with with Prof. Lin Shao and Dr. Xiao Ma at the School of Computing of National University of Singapore in summer of 2022. My former research (during undergraduate) mainly focused on Reinforcement Learning for motion planning in Autonomous Driving. Partially, I also did some research about Computer Vision and Language Model.

As a member of HiPeR Lab, my current and on-going research interest lies on Reinforcement Learning, Robotics, Control and Multi-Agent System. Specifically, I'm trying to use Deep Reinforcement Learning to solve complex model like aerodynamic effect in UAV control, and advanced design of the multimodal robots.

Education

Ph.D. in Robotics
Aug. 2023 -- Present

University of California, Berkeley
B.Eng. of Vehicle Engineering
Sept. 2018 -- Jul. 2023

Tongji University, Shanghai
High School Student
Sept. 2015 -- Jun. 2018

Wuhan No.2 High School

News

09/2024: I'm selected as the Student Originizer of Bay Aera Robotics Symposium 2024.
07/2023: I'm awarded as the Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai in 2023.
06/2023: The defense of my undergrad thesis is finished. The Next Station would be Berkeley!
09/2022: Our paper PIPO for Distributed Multi-Robot Navigation wins the Best Student Paper.
07/2022: Our paper ResRace is accepted by IEEE RA-L!
06/2022: I started my summer research internship, working with Prof. Lin Shao and Dr. Xiao Ma at NUS SoC!

Selected Publications

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey
Ruiqi Zhang, Jing Hou, Florian Walter, Shangding Gu, Jiayi Guan, Florian Röhrbein, Yali Du, Panpan Cai, Guang Chen*, Alois Knoll [ArXiv] [Website]
"A comprehesive survey for the benchmark, methodologies, challenges and future of MARL for autonomous driving."

CDCP: Conditional Diffusion Model with Contextual Prompts for Multi-task Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning
Jiayi Guan, Tianle Zhang, Li Shen, Ruiqi Zhang, Lusong Li, Guang Chen*, Changjun Jiang
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (Under Review)
[Pre-Print]
"We propose a Conditional Dffusion model with Contextual Prompts to address the multiple challenges encountered in multi-task offline safe RL."

Spreeze: High-Throughput Parallel Reinforcement Learning Framework
Jing Hou, Guang Chen*, Ruiqi Zhang, Zhijun Li, Shangding Gu, Changjun Jiang
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (Under Review)
[Pre-Print]
"A highly parallelized RL frameworks Spreeze with automatic hyperparameter adjustment."

Residual Policy Learning Facilitates Efficient Model-Free Autonomous Racing
Ruiqi Zhang, Jing Hou, Guang Chen*, Zhijun Li, Jianxiao Chen, Alois Knoll
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (Pubished)
[Paper] [Video] [Code]
"A human-level RL-based controller for generalizable high-speed mapless Autonomous Racing."

PIPO: Policy Optimization with Permutation-Invariant Constraint for Distributed Multi-Robot Navigation
Ruiqi Zhang, Guang Chen*, Jing Hou, Zhijun Li, Alois Knoll
IEEE International Conference on Multi-Sensor Fusion and Integration, 2022 (Selected as Best Student Paper)
[Paper]
"A scalable decentralized MARL-based controller for large-scale Multi-Robot Navigation."

Awards

Shanghai Outstanding Student, 2023 (Ranking 1st)
Enterprise Scholarship sponsored by Weichai Inc., 2022
Silver Medal of Formula Student China, 2021
Tongji Outstanding Scholarship for Undergraduates, 2019, 2020

Service

Academic Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
IEEE Transaction on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE)
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Affiliations

Mentors

Prof. Mark Mueller
UC Berkeley

Prof. Guang CHEN
Tongji University

Prof. Alois Knoll
TU München

Prof. Lin SHAO
NUS

Dr. Xiao MA
Dyson Robotics

Dr. Jing HOU
Tongji University

Miscellanea

Friends

HiPeR Lab members. We are family :)
Yuxin HU is a Ph.D. student @ UC Berkeley. He has a nice Subaru car and is our named driver of all activities. He is seeking a girlfriend.
Yu'An CHEN is a M.S. @ CMU. She is my middle and high school class mate and going to pursuit her Ph.D. @ CityU, Hong Kong. Good luck to her.
Zhongyu LI is a Ph.D. @ UC Berkeley. As the greatest student of Koushil Sreenath, he is super hard-working (JUAN). He is seeking a position in academia, help him please.
Huaibo CHEN is a Ph.D. student @ MIT. He should be a role model for all Tongji students.
Chaoyue WANG is a M.S. @ University of Copenhagen. Definitely, he is a great research in Quantum Computing. Nobel prize deserves him :)
William SU is a undergraduate @ UC Berkeley. A handsome young boy. He is an expert in Aerodynamics and a researcher of NASA.
Jiaze CAI is a M.Eng. student @ UC Berkeley. He is a kind guy and has a nice Honda SUV and a funny flapping-wing robot.
Sen NA is a Professor @ Gatech. He has a cute dog named Sigma. Hope everything goes well for his new lab.

Hobbies
In my spare time, I like watch sport games (especially, MLB, NBA and Formula 1) and animation (see my list here). Specifically, I'm a big fan of YOASOBI (a J-POP band), Shohei Ohtani. Let's Go Dodgers! Also I'm a player of wide-range Games like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and PalWorld.
Welcome to contact me for the same interest :)

Contact

richzhang@berkeley.edu
2505 Hearst Ave., Etcheverry Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA