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

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! 🎉

Sponsors

ARL FAA USDA SARE
Harmoni

ZhouLab     Lifeng Zhou     lfzhou917     ZhouLab
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University
506 Bossone Research Building, 3140 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104