Chaoxiang Ye

Chaoxiang Ye

Ph.D. candidate at TU Delft, 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 aerial intelligence: enabling small aerial robots to perceive, navigate, and interact with the physical world through touch. I develop lightweight tactile sensors, learning-based perception methods, and closed-loop control strategies for contact-rich robotic systems.

I am particularly interested in tactile perception, aerial physical interaction, embodied AI, multimodal sensing, and compact robot learning systems that can operate on resource-constrained platforms.

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Publications

For a complete and up-to-date list, please see my Google Scholar.

Whisker-based tactile flight for tiny drones

Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones

Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon, Salua Hamaza
Under review · arXiv preprint, 2025

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
A biomorphic whisker sensor for aerial tactile applications

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
Tactile hardness recognition

Stacked Convolutional Supervised Auto-encoder Based on Improved Earth Mover's Distance Loss for Tactile Hardness Recognition

Chaoxiang Ye, Senlin Fang, Meng Yin, Xiaoyu Li, Zhengkun Yi, Xinyu Wu
Manuscript / Preprint

A tactile hardness recognition method using supervised autoencoder representations and distance-aware ordinal supervision.

Tactile gesture recognition

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 Cyborg and Bionic 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 · Aerial robotics · Embodied AI · Multimodal perception · Contact-rich control · Embedded robotic systems