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:

• Vision-Language Navigation
• Spatial Intelligence
• Autonomous Robot Exploration/Reconstruction

I am also interested in Mobile Manipulation, Vision-Language-Action (VLA), 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

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† arXiv Preprint, 2026.

OnFly: Onboard Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation toward Safety and Efficiency Guiyong Zheng, Yueting Ban, Mingjie Zhang, Juepeng Zheng, Boyu Zhou† arXiv Preprint, 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.

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

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