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About

Jieji Ren is an emerging robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of soft robotics, tactile sensing, and robot learning. With a growing body of highly cited publications, Ren has established a distinctive research identity centered on enabling robots to interact with the physical world more dexterously and intelligently. Ren's most recognized contribution — a soft robotic hand with tactile palm-finger coordination (2025, 48 citations) — addresses a long-overlooked gap by integrating sensing across the entire hand surface, not just the fingers. Complementing this, work on biomimetic rigid-soft finger design (29 citations) advances the field of dexterous manipulation by faithfully translating human musculoskeletal principles into robotic hardware. Ren has also made notable strides in tactile sensor development, including the multi-axis iontronic force sensor (13 citations) and the systematic GelLight illumination framework for camera-based tactile sensors. Beyond hardware, the AirExo exoskeleton system (30 citations) demonstrates Ren's breadth, enabling robots to learn whole-arm manipulation from human demonstrations in unstructured environments. Taken together, Ren's research paints a coherent vision: building robots that sense, adapt, and learn with human-like sophistication — a contribution increasingly vital to the future of embodied AI.