My Name is Jiading Fang (方家鼎). I am currently a PhD student from Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) at Robot Intelligence through Perception Lab (RIPL). My advisors are Matthew Walter and Greg Shakhnarovich.
My research goal is to enable "Embodied Spatial Intelligence", which aims to ground the high-level goal and low-level dexterity in the semantic 3D world that all physical agents live. It spans two sub-directions: 3D perception and 3D reasoning.
For 3D perception, I have worked on "3D scene representation from self-supervision" that builds robust, scalable and generalizable scene representations for robots;
For 3D reasoning, I have developed "Embodied Reasoning with Large Language Models" including applying large language models (LLMs) on long-term planning, navigation and 3D referring reasoning tasks that are critical for robot agents. My research reveals "Hidden challenges towards builing 3D robotic foundation models".
Overall, I wish in the future, capable and friendly robots will co-live with humans in every home, so that kids can have their friends to play soccer after school, adults can have their assistants to help with daily chores, and seniors can have their supporters when physical or emotional supports are needed. Yes, I like Baymax!
I am currently working for Waymo on spatial VLMs. You are very welcome to reach out for collaborations or simply a coffee chat!