Professor Shan Luo is a Full Professor in Robotics and AI at King's College London, where he leads the Robot Perception Lab and directs research on visual-tactile intelligence, multimodal perception, and robot dexterity. He obtained his PhD in Robotics from King's College London in 2016 and was a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Following his PhD, he held research positions at the University of Leeds and Harvard University before joining the University of Liverpool as a Lecturer in 2018, where he led the smARTLab at the Department of Computer Science. He returned to King's College London in 2021 to further expand his research on intelligent robotic systems that integrate perception, learning, and physical interaction.

Professor Luo has published over 100 papers in leading journals and conferences, including Nature Communications, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), Advanced Science, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), ICRA, IROS, RSS, ICML, CVPR, and ECCV.

He is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics and has served in editorial roles for major robotics conferences including ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, and AAAI. He also led the highly successful IEEE Transactions on Robotics Special Collection on Tactile Robotics, which attracted a record-breaking number of submissions and has become a landmark initiative for the tactile robotics community.

He has secured significant research funding from major UK and international agencies and industry partners, including EPSRC, AHRC, Innovate UK, the Royal Society, and Unilever, with over £4.4 million as Principal Investigator and more than £13 million as Co-Investigator.

Professor Luo is an EPSRC Open Fellow, a Turing Open Source AI Fellow, and a Hi! Paris International Visiting Chair. His accolades also include the EPSRC New Investigator Award, BCS Academy New Appointments Grant Scheme Award, UK-RAS Early Career Award, and the Faculty Learning & Teaching and Student Experience Award. Beyond his research, he founded the international ViTac community, which has become one of the leading global forums for research in visual–tactile sensing and tactile intelligence.

Research interests

• Physical AI
• Visuo-Tactile Robotics
• Physical Foundation and World Models
• Robot Learning for Grasping and Manipulation

More information

• Research profile

• Personal website