Xuerong Ji

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Papers

Total Citations

259

H-Index

About

Xuerong Ji is a pioneering researcher in robotic manipulation and compliant motion planning, whose work has fundamentally advanced how robots interact with complex physical environments. Her key research areas include automated contact state reasoning, geometric reasoning for assembly, and motion planning under physical constraints. Ji’s most influential contribution is her development of a divide-and-merge approach for the automatic generation of high-level contact state spaces—represented as contact formation (CF) graphs—between polyhedral solids. This work, published in 2001 and garnering 111 citations, provided a systematic method for representing the discrete contact states that arise during robotic tasks, a critical step toward enabling robots to plan and execute assembly and part-mating operations autonomously. Building on this foundation, her 2001 paper on planning motions compliant to complex contact states (94 citations) addressed the unique challenge of ensuring that a planned path exactly satisfies desired contact conditions—a problem that collision-free planners cannot solve. Ji’s research has had lasting impact on the fields of robotic assembly, compliant manipulation, and automated manufacturing, providing both theoretical frameworks and practical algorithms that continue to inform modern approaches to contact-rich manipulation.