Speakers

Prof. Kensuke Harada (Fellow, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree from the Graduate School of Mechanical Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. He is currently a Professor working at the Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University. From 1997 to 2002, he was a Research Associate at Graduate Industrial and Systems Engineering, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Computer Science Department, Stanford University, CA, USA. Before joining Osaka University, he was a Researcher at National Inst. of AIST, Tsukuba, Japan. His research interests include mechanics and control of humanoid robots and robotic hands.

Title： Soft Robotic Hands for Grasping and Manipulation
This talk introduces soft robotic hands for object grasping and manipulation. There remain many handling operations performed by humans in food industry, agriculture, and low-volume production. These operations require flexibility and adaptability against object variances and changeovers. Soft robotic hands will contribute to such operations. In this talk, I will introduce soft robotic hands designed and fabricated for handling food, agricultural products, textiles, and living organisms.

Shinichi Hirai received his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics and physics from Kyoto University in 1991. He joined the newly established Department of Robotics at Ritsumeikan University in 1996. Since 2002, he has been a Professor in the department. He was a Visiting Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and was an Assistant Professor at Osaka University from 1990 to 1996. His current research interests include soft robotic hands, soft sensors, soft object manipulation, and soft object modeling. He received the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) Best Paper Award in 2008, FOOMA Japan Academic Plaza Award in 2018, and International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots Best Paper Award in 2020. He is a member of IEEE, RSJ, JSME, and SICE.

Wenying Xu is a Professor in the Department of System Science, Southeast University. She received her Ph.D. from City University of Hong Kong in 2017, and her M.S. degree from Southeast University, China, in 2014. Prior to her current position, She was a Research Fellow in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University from 2017 to 2018 and was an Academic Visitor in the Department of Computer Science, Brunel University London, from May 2015 to Aug. 2015 and from Oct. 2019 to Dec. 2019. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany from 2019 to 2021, and an Associate Professor in the Department of System Science, Southeast University from 2020 to 2023. Her research interests include cyber-physical system, game theory in networks, distributed event-triggered control, and distributed cooperative control. Dr. Xu was a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 2018.

Haoang Li received the B.E. and M.E. degrees from the School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, China, in 2016 and 2018, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2022. He is currently an Assistant Professor of the Thrust of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Thrust of Intelligent Transportation, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China. Before that, he was a Postdoc researcher with the School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Germany from 2022 to 2024. He was a visiting PhD student with the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2021. His research interests include computer vision and robotics. He is currently serving as the Associate Editor of IEEE ICRA, and an organizing committee member for IEEE/RSJ IROS 2025. He received IEEE ICCV Doctoral Consortium Award and third place in IEEE ICRA RoboDrive Challenge.

Yue Wang works as a professor in the Department of Control Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University. His research has yielded over 50 publications in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature Communications, the International Journal of Robotics Research, and IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He is a recipient of the Best Paper Award in Robot Vision at ICRA 2024 and a Best Paper Finalist in Robot Mechanism and Design at IROS 2023. He actively contributes to the robotics community as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and flagship conferences ICRA and IROS. His current research interest is robot learning for lifelong navigation and generalist manipulation.

Title: Robust Model-Based In-Hand Manipulation with Integrated Real-Time Motion-Contact Planning and Tracking
Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale training or extensive data collection for each specific task, model-based methods offer an efficient alternative. However, due to the complexity of physical contacts, existing model-based methods encounter challenges in efficient online planning and handling modeling errors, which limit their practical applications. To advance the effectiveness and robustness of model-based contact-rich in-hand manipulation, this talk introduces a novel integrated framework that mitigates these limitations. The integration involves two key aspects: 1) integrated real-time planning and tracking achieved by a hierarchical structure; and 2) joint optimization of motions and contacts achieved by integrated motion-contact modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing model-based methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and real-time performance.

Xiang Li is an Associate Professor with the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University. His research interests include robotic dexterous manipulation and human-robot collaboration. He has published a monograph distributed by Springer and authored over 100 papers in the field of robotics, including publications in IJRR, TRO, Automatica, TAC, ICRA, and IROS. He has been the Associate Editor of IJRR since 2024 and the Associate Editor of TRO since 2025. He received the IROS Best Application Paper Finalist in 2017, the ICRA Best Medical Robotics Paper Finalist in 2024, and the RAL Outstanding Associate Editor in 2025. He led the team and won the first place at 2024 ICRA Robotic Grasping and Manipulation Challenge – in-hand track and also the Most Elegant Solution across all the tracks. He was the Program Chair of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Real-time Computing and Robotics (RCAR).