Jingfan Tang

I'm an undergraduate student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where I work in Robotics Autonomy and Planning Lab with Zhongqiang (Richard) Ren. Currently I am also a student intern at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Ji Zhang.

I am working on planning and robot autonomy. I develop solvers for routing problems and build robotics systems in simulation and the real world. Also, I leverage vision language models to enhance decision-making.

I am actively seeking a Ph.D position in robotics, computer science, or related fields starting in Fall 2027.

Email  /  Scholar  /  Github  /  CV

News

[Apr 2026] We are organizing CMU-VLN-Challenge. Please check our website.

[Jan 2026] Start my exchange at Carnegie Mellon University.

[Sep 2025] Our paper HEHA is accepted to IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS 2025) as a poster paper.

Research

My research interests lie at the intersection of algorithmic robotics and machine intelligence. I am dedicated to designing efficient search and optimization-based algorithms, aiming to bridge the gap between classical methods and modern learning-based approaches to achieve provably safe and intelligent robot autonomy.

Reformulating vision-language navigation as navigable pixel grounding, and predicting a visible pixel in the image plane that is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for navigation.

Introducing the Routing with Probabilistic Vertices (RPV) to model map prediction uncertainty, with efficient optimal (RPV*) and bounded suboptimal solvers (F-RPV*).

Considering the path planning problem for autonomous exploration of an unknown environment using multiple heterogeneous robots and solving with search-based method.

Miscellanea

Thanks to Jon Barron for the website template.