Chaoxiang Ye

Ph.D. candidate at Delft University of Technology, supervised by Prof. Guido de Croon and Dr. Salua Hamaza.

Micro Air Vehicle Lab · BioMorphic Intelligence Lab · Delft University of Technology

I received my joint M.Eng. degree from Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), supervised by Prof. Zhengkun Yi. I received my B.Eng. degree from Dalian University of Technology (DUT).

My research focuses on tactile robotics and active physical interaction. I study how robots can use touch not only to detect contact, but also to perceive their surroundings, actively acquire information, and support closed-loop control and decision making. My Ph.D. research has focused particularly on bringing these capabilities to tiny aerial robots under severe sensing, computation, and payload constraints.

My broader research interests include tactile sensing and perception, active perception, sensorimotor learning, perception–control integration, embodied intelligence, and Multi-modal Learning.

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Publications

Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones

Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon, Salua Hamaza

Nature Communications, accepted, 2026

We present a tactile flight framework that enables tiny drones to physically sense, navigate, and actively explore their surroundings using lightweight artificial whiskers. The system integrates a biomimetic whisker sensor, learning-based contact-depth estimation with Kalman filtering, and an onboard finite-state control architecture, allowing a micro aerial vehicle to detect obstacles, maintain tactile interaction, follow surface contours, and build local understanding of confined environments without relying on vision. Real-world flight experiments demonstrate tactile navigation, contour following, and autonomous exploration on a resource-constrained aerial platform.

arXiv PDF Code / Data

A Biomorphic Whisker Sensor for Aerial Tactile Applications

Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon, Salua Hamaza

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024

We propose a lightweight whisker-inspired tactile sensing system for aerial robots, enabling 3D contact localization through compliant sensing and temporal learning.

PDF Code / Dataset

Multi-kernel-size Convolutional Supervised Autoencoders for Tactile Gesture Recognition

Chaoxiang Ye, Xiaoyu Li, Binhua Huang, Yuanzhe Su, Tingting Mi, Zhenning Zhou, Zhengkun Yi, Xinyu Wu

IEEE International Conference on CYBER Technology in Automation, Control, and Intelligent Systems (CYBER), 2022

We introduce a supervised autoencoder framework for tactile gesture recognition, improving representation learning and generalization on limited tactile data.

PDF

Research Interests

Tactile Sensing · Active Perception · Embodied Intelligence · Sensorimotor Learning · Perception–Control Integration · Multi-modal Learning · Machine Learning