I am an assistant research professor in University of Michigan. My research interests are self-driving cars and AI safety.

I am leading the AV safety project in Mcity, and leading the DARPA Challenge for transferable agents TIAMAT.

Welcome to use our developed self-driving planning toolchains, SPIDER.

My Research Vision: Next Generation of Autonomous Vehicles, Free from Curse of Rarity (AV 3.0).

Welcome any coffee chat in Ann Arbor or discussions on my research topics.

Recent News

• Our team organized the special session on ITSC 2024.
• Our SPIDER team won the MCITY AV Challenge in 2024 (Team members include Weitao Zhou, Junze Wen, Zelin Qian. I did not participant this time but still be proud of them)
• I gave a talk on Next Generation Transportation Systems Seminar at Umich.
• I organized the self-driving large model workshop in CICV 2024.
• I was awarded the Outstanding Tsinghua Postdoctoral Fellow (10 of all Tsinghua postdoc), 2023.
• I gave a talk to the CTO of DiDi, Mr. Bo Zhang. Our team received contracts for developing Didi’s self-driving Cars, 2023.
• I was awarded the First Prize of Scientific and Technological Progress by the China Society of Automotive Engineers in 2023.
• Our works are featured in over 50 media outlets, including Renmin News (China), Xinhua News (China), Tsinghua University, AFP News(Japan), DeepAI.
• My paper on continually improved self-driving cars was published in Nature Machine Intelligence on March, 2023.
• I received the award from Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (12 selected from Chinese automotive community) in 2022.
• I received the contract from NSFC (2022-2024) for the project “Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning Planning Method for Autonomous Driving” (~$45,000 funding, PI).
• I was nominated as the Outstanding Ph.D. dissertation Award of the China Society of Automotive Engineers in 2021.
• I received the contract from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021-2022) for the project “Continuous Improvement of Self-driving Cars in Disengagement Cases” (~$11,400 funding, PI).
• Our team successfuly run a self-driving car in 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games in 2021! (Thanks for the strong help from Xiang Li)
• We developed an open-source full-stack self-driving platform, Cloud Learning compatible Autonomous driving Platform (CLAP) (Working with Dr. Yuanxin Zhong and Dr. Minghan Zhu), 2019.

Highlight Research

1. Continuous Improvement of Self-driving Car for Corner Cases

• Enabling the inferring capability on Self-driving Cars, to handle the corner cases through observation, exploration, and continuous self-improvement.
• Published in Nature Machine Intelligence, featured in over 50 media outlets, including Renmin News (China), Xinhua News (China), Tsinghua University, AFP News(Japan), DeepAI.
• Dragomir Anguelov, Chief Scientist at Waymo (Google), listed this work as the first one in five representative solutions for the long-tail problem in autonomous driving.

2. Developing Self-driving Cars for 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games

• Achieveing open-road self-driving cars, which can navigate unseen conditions such as rain, snow, nighttime, and strange obstacles.
• I am the on-board Tech Lead.
• Featured by China Youth Daily

3. Self-driving Development Tools

• Full-stack self-driving platform, Cloud Learning compatible Autonomous driving Platform (CLAP).
• Self-driving planning toolchains, SPIDER.
• Champion in Mcity Challenge, 2024.
• Second Place in CARLA Challenge, 2019.

Contact

Email: zhcao@umich.edu