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Hao Xu 徐浩

Nanjing University · SOARLAB

Hao Xu 徐浩

Tenure-track Associate Professor
School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University

I am a tenure-track associate professor at the School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, where I lead SOARLAB, the Flying General Intelligence Lab. My research centers on embodied AI for drones, humanoids, and flying humanoids.

Before NJU, I was an associate researcher at Beihang University and a multi-sensor fusion algorithm engineer at DJI, where I worked on the SLAM 2/3 localization algorithms used in the DJI Air 3S. I received my Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering from HKUST in 2023, advised by Prof. Shaojie Shen, and my B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China.

Join SOARLAB Recruiting Ph.D. and master's students for 2027 →
Hao Xu holding a radio transmitter beside a hovering quadrotor
01

News

  1. Paper

    New preprint Spatial Memory by Agents, for Agents: coding agents design a robot's spatial memory by writing code, running benchmarks, and iterating on feedback, which we call Guided System Improvement (GSI). The best configuration improves the average unified score by about 51% over the strongest all-task baseline. With Mondo Robotics. Project page

  2. Award

    AUG received an Honorable Mention for the IROS 2026 Best Paper Award on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics.

  3. Paper

    ECHO-G is out: humanoids that gesture on the beat while they talk, with end-to-end whole-body control running on a Jetson Orin AGX. With Mondo Robotics and the HKUST Aerial Robotics Group. arXiv · Code · Video

  4. Lab

    Started SOARLAB, the Flying General Intelligence Lab, at Nanjing University. We are recruiting Ph.D. and master's students for 2027: admissions.

02

Research

I work on embodied intelligence for robots that fly, walk, and work together: robotics agents that perceive, plan, and act on real hardware; world-action and vision-language-action foundation models for drones, humanoids, and flying humanoids; and the state estimation, SLAM, and swarm systems underneath them.

  • Embodied AI
  • Robotics agents
  • WAM / VLA robot foundation models
  • Flying humanoids
  • Aerial swarms
  • State estimation & SLAM
  • Sensor fusion
Research at SOARLAB →
A swarm of five quadrotors flying together
Omni-Swarm: decentralized state estimation for aerial swarms.
03

Selected Publications

  1. Spatial Memory by Agents, for Agents

    Qianwei Wang, Ce Zhang, Zhanpeng Luo, Pengpeng Su, Shuo Yang, Hao Xu

    arXiv preprint, 2026

    arXiv Project

  2. ECHO-G: Embodied Co-speech Humanoid mOtion Generation

    Yizhao Li*, Pusen Gao*, Ming Wang, Shaojie Shen, Shuo Yang, Hao Xu

    arXiv preprint, 2026

    arXiv Code Project Video

  3. AUG: Perception-Aware UAV Graph-Based Planning for GNSS-Denied Navigation in Feature-Sparse Environments

    Enguang Feng, Haohuan Yuan, Hong Zhang, Hao Xu, Yikun Dou, Jiarong Lin, Xiwang Dong

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

    Honorable Mention, IROS 2026 Best Paper Award on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics

    Project PDF

  4. Autonomous Flights Inside Narrow Tunnels

    Luqi Wang, Yan Ning, Hongming Chen, Peize Liu, Yang Xu, Hao Xu, Ximin Lyu, Shaojie Shen

    IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2025

    arXiv Code

  5. D²SLAM: Decentralized and Distributed Collaborative Visual-Inertial SLAM System for Aerial Swarm

    Hao Xu, Peize Liu, Xinyi Chen, Shaojie Shen

    IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2024

    arXiv Code

  6. OmniNxt: A Fully Open-Source and Compact Aerial Robot with Omnidirectional Visual Perception

    Peize Liu, Chen Feng, Yang Xu, Yan Ning, Hao Xu, Shaojie Shen

    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024

    arXiv Code

  7. RACER: Rapid Collaborative Exploration With a Decentralized Multi-UAV System

    Boyu Zhou, Hao Xu, Shaojie Shen

    IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2023

    IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award

    arXiv Code

  8. Omni-Swarm: A Decentralized Omnidirectional Visual-Inertial-UWB State Estimation System for Aerial Swarms

    Hao Xu, Yichen Zhang, Boyu Zhou, Luqi Wang, Xinjie Yao, Guotao Meng, Shaojie Shen

    IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2022

    arXiv Code

  9. Decentralized Visual-Inertial-UWB Fusion for Relative State Estimation of Aerial Swarm

    Hao Xu, Luqi Wang, Yichen Zhang, Kejie Qiu, Shaojie Shen

    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020

    arXiv PDF

Full list on Google Scholar. * Equal contribution.

04

Open Source

05

Play

3D · SOARLAB homepage SOAR Research Flight Fly the SOAR flying humanoid through Reviewer #2, code bugs, and deadline meteors in the 3D world behind the SOARLAB homepage, then take the Publish Citadel. Play → Three.js arcade · 轨道清道夫 Orbital Sweeper Clear debris and repair orbital nodes in a 600 km low Earth orbit, then upgrade your service ship. Inspired by space-robotics research. Play →
06

Beyond the Lab

I have flown RC aircraft for years: helicopters, fixed-wing warbirds, jets, and FPV racing drones. I also build tools for flight simulation, such as FOXTracker and DCSNoJoy for DCS World.

An RC helicopter and a quadrotor on a picnic table
An RC P-51 Mustang with a radio transmitter
An RC J-10 jet in an aerobatic team livery