Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Haozheng Xu is a leading researcher at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and surgical automation, with a primary focus on advancing Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS). His work centers on solving two critical challenges: estimating the pose of surgical instruments and maintaining optimal probe-tissue contact for intraoperative imaging. Xu has made major contributions by developing markerless, occlusion-robust pose estimation methods using graph-based and deep learning techniques, which are essential for autonomous surgical task execution and navigation. He also pioneered deep regression models enhanced with temporal information fusion and adversarial training to control probe-tissue distance in probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE), enabling high-quality cellular imaging during tumor resection. His work has been recognized through leadership in benchmark challenges—he co-organized the SurgT challenge (23 citations) and the SurgRIPE challenge (5 citations), which set standards for soft-tissue tracking and instrument pose estimation. With over 45 total citations across his top papers, Xu’s research directly enables safer, more autonomous robotic surgery, making him a rising figure in surgical robotics and computer-assisted intervention.