Mingjie Zhang (张明杰)

I am an MPhil student at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), supervised by Prof. Boyu ZHOU (周博宇) and Prof. Jun MA (马骏). I also work at STAR Robotics Lab, Southern University of Science and Technology.

My research lies at the intersection of Robotics and Embodied AI.

Current focus includes:

• Robot Navigation
• Spatial Intelligence
• Mobile Manipulation
• Active Exploration/Reconstruction

I am also interested in Vision-Language-Action (VLA), Agentic Systems, and Humanoid Robotics.

If you are interested in research opportunities or collaborations, feel free to reach out at zagerzhang@gmail.com or mzhang472@connect.hkust-gz.edu.cn.

Email Google Scholar GitHub Bilibili

Publications

Synergizing Efficiency and Reliability for Continuous Mobile Manipulation Chengkai Wu, Ruilin Wang*, Yixin Zeng*, Jiayuan Wang, Mingjie Zhang, Guiyong Zheng, Qun Niu, Juepeng Zheng, Jun Ma, Boyu Zhou† arXiv Preprint, 2026.

C²-Explorer: Contiguity-Driven Task Allocation with Connectivity-Aware Task Representation for Decentralized Multi-UAV Exploration Xinlu Yan*, Mingjie Zhang*, Yuhao Fang, Yanke Sun, Jun Ma, Youmin Gong, Boyu Zhou†, Jie Mei† IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026.

OnFly: Onboard Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation toward Safety and Efficiency Guiyong Zheng, Yueting Ban, Mingjie Zhang, Juepeng Zheng, Boyu Zhou† IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026.

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. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026.

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.

Service

• Conference Reviewer ICRA, IROS
• Journal Reviewer RA-L, T-RO, JFR

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