Hello! I’m Mingjie Zhang (张明杰), an MPhil student at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), under the supervision of Prof. Boyu ZHOU (周博宇) and Prof. Jun MA (马骏).

I am actively looking for the PhD opportunity in Fall 2026.

My research interests lie in Robotics and Embodied AI, related research and currently focusing on:

• Vision-Language Navigation
• Autonomous Aerial Reconstruction/Exploration

I also have a strong interest in Mobile Manipulation, VLA and Humanoid.

Hobbies: Badminton🏸, Swimming🏊‍.

Education

• MPhil Student, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), 2024 – 2026 (expected)

• B.Eng, School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 2020 – 2024

Experience

• STAR Robotics Lab, Southern University of Science and Technology
  • Research Assistant Shenzhen, China 2023.09 – Present
  • Worked on Vision-Language Navigation and Autonomous Aerial Exploration/Reconstruction in collaboration with Prof. Boyu ZHOU.

• Northwestern Polytechnical University Football Robot Team
  • Captain of the Humanoid Robot Team Xi’an, China 2022.07 – 2023.09
  • Provided robot hardware/software technical support and achieved multiple national-level robotics awards.

Publications

ApexNav: An Adaptive Exploration Strategy for Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Target-centric Semantic Fusion Mingjie Zhang, Yuheng Du, Chengkai Wu, Jinni Zhou, Zhenchao Qi, Jun Ma, Boyu Zhou† IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), 2025 (underview).

SOAR: Simultaneous Exploration and Photographing with Heterogeneous UAVs for Fast Autonomous Reconstruction Mingjie Zhang*, Chen Feng*, Zengzhi Li, Guiyong Zheng, Yiming Luo, Zhu Wang, Jinni Zhou, Shaojie Shen, and Boyu Zhou† IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024. (Oral)

FC-Planner: A Skeleton-guided Planning Framework for Fast Aerial Coverage of Complex 3D Scenes Chen Feng, Haojia Li, Mingjie Zhang, Xinyi Chen, Boyu Zhou†, and Shaojie Shen IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. (Best Paper Award on UAV Finalists)

Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge: A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Multi-UAV Planning and Lessons Learned Muqing Cao, Thien-Minh Nguyen, Shenghai Yuan, Andreas Anastasiou, Angelos Zacharia, Savvas Papaioannou, Panayiotis Kolios, Christos G Panayiotou, Marios M Polycarpou, Xinhang Xu, Mingjie Zhang, Fei Gao, Boyu Zhou, Ben M Chen, Lihua Xie IEEE Robotics Automation & Magazine (RAM), 2025.

Selected Honors

• IEEE ICRA Best Paper Award on UAV Finalists, 2024, IEEE Robotics & Automation Society
• National Scholarship, 2022 & 2023, Ministry of Education of P.R. China
• Outstanding Graduate, 2024, Northwestern Polytechnical University
• Outstanding Student, 2021 & 2022 & 2023, Northwestern Polytechnical University
• Cooperative Aerial Robots Inspection Challenge 3rd Place, 2023, IEEE CDC
• Yat-sen Challenge of Intelligent Cooperative Robots 1st Prize, 2023, SYSU
• National Robot Championship Competition First Prize, 2021 & 2022, CAAI
• International Underwater Robot Competition First Prize, 2021, Organizing Committee of IURC