Zhou Lab

About

The Drexel Zhou Lab advances the robustness, reliability, and scalability of robotics and multi-robot systems. Our research integrates robotics with foundation models, including LLMs, VLMs, VLAs, and world models, driven by real-world challenges in warehouse logistics, search and rescue, precision agriculture, urban mobility, and agricultural processing.

News

Sep 10, 2026	Our paper "Vision Language Models Cannot Plan, but Can They Formalize?" won the Best Paper Award at the ECCV 2026 WMEAI Workshop! 🎉
Sep 09, 2026	Our paper on process-aware robotic food assembly with closed-loop visual monitoring has been published in Journal of Agriculture and Food Research.
Sep 05, 2026	Two papers accepted to SSRR 2026: LLM-based decentralized multi-robot flocking (LLM-Flock) and an interceptor drone for perimeter defense (Project SCOUT).
Aug 21, 2026	Our team placed in the Top-10 of the Multi-Task (Generalist) Track at the RSS 2026 Workshop & Challenge on Post-Training for Robotics Foundation Models.
Aug 07, 2026	Two papers accepted to ECCV 2026 Workshops: aerial-ground cross-view dataset for heterogeneous robot teams (AGT-CV) (CDEL) and VLMs for task formalization (WMEAI).
Aug 02, 2026	Our paper on completion-aware VLA for long-horizon manipulation (SeqVLA) has been accepted to ISRR 2026.
Jul 13, 2026	Two papers accepted to DARS 2026: LLM-driven decentralized swarm foraging and low-cost VLA architecture for soft grasping (VILAS).
Jun 16, 2026	Our paper on identifying planning-critical occluded agents via VLMs has been accepted to IROS 2026.
May 27, 2026	Three papers accepted to CASE 2026: weight-aware robotic grasping via VLA (CLAW), VLA inference optimization for smart agricultural manipulation, and root-oriented geometry for robotic grasping (ROG-Grasp).
May 21, 2026	Our FM-MRS Workshop @ IROS 2026 has been accepted and is now online.
May 02, 2026	Our paper titled "Large Language Models for Multi-Robot Systems: A Survey" has been accepted to Autonomous Robots.
Apr 06, 2026	Our paper titled "Fuzzy Encoding-Decoding to Improve Spiking Q-Learning Performance in Autonomous Driving" has been accepted to NICE 2026.
Mar 26, 2026	Our paper titled "Policy-Guided World Model Planning for Language-Conditioned Visual Navigation" has been accepted to CVPR Workshops 2026.
Jan 21, 2026	Our paper on in-situ microplastic detection on food via hyperspectral imaging has been published in Journal of Chemometrics.
Jan 16, 2026	Our paper on VLA-based intelligent food portioning for small-scale food operations has been published in Journal of Future Foods.
Dec 23, 2025	Two papers published in TASE: failure-aware multi-robot coordination for resilient target tracking and RL for game-theoretic resource allocation on graphs.
Dec 19, 2025	Our paper on spiking architecture for multi-modal decision-making in autonomous vehicles has been accepted as an extended abstract to AAMAS 2026.
Sep 29, 2025	Our paper on hierarchical LLM-in-the-loop optimization for multi-robot tracking under unknown hazards has been accepted to MRS 2025.
Jun 15, 2025	Our paper on resilient multi-robot tracking has been accepted to IROS 2025 and selected as a Best Paper Finalist!
May 06, 2025	Our paper on game-theoretic robot allocation has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO).
Apr 14, 2025	Our paper on Finetuning chain-of-thought of small vision-language models for autonomous driving has been accepted to CVPR 2025 WDFM-AD Workshop.
Mar 15, 2025	Our paper on LLM-powered open-vocabulary scene segmentation with language embedded 3D Gaussians won the Best Paper Award at the WACV 2025 LLVM-AD Workshop! 🎉

About

News

Sponsors