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About

Zhiyuan Zhou is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of soft robotics, tactile sensing, and embodied AI, with a focus on enabling robots to perceive and interact in challenging environments—from dry land to the deep sea. Their major contributions center on developing vision-based proprioception systems that allow soft robotic fingers to “feel” through fluidic interference and low-visibility conditions. Zhou’s landmark work, “Autoencoding a Soft Touch to Learn Grasping from On‐Land to Underwater” (2023, 10 citations), introduced a breakthrough method using high-frame-rate cameras and omnidirectional adaptive fingers to transfer land-learned grasping skills to aquatic settings. This was further advanced in “Proprioceptive State Estimation for Amphibious Tactile Sensing” (2024, 9 citations), which demonstrated a metamaterial structure enabling omnidirectional tactile reconstruction in both terrestrial and underwater environments. Their work on reconstructing soft robotic touch via in-finger vision (2024) has also opened new avenues for integrating authentic tactile feedback into virtual and robotic systems. With a growing citation impact and a clear trajectory toward amphibious dexterity, Zhou is shaping the future of soft robotic manipulation for ocean exploration and beyond.