Dr. Fan Wu

Dr. Fan Wu

Prof. at Shanghai University
(former Postdoc @ TUM)
TUM

(image credit: Personal webpage)

Biography

Since September 2025, I have joined Shanghai University as an associate professor.

I was a research scientist (postdoc) at Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) and the Chair of Robotics and Systems Intelligence (RSI) with Prof. Sami Haddadin. Before joining MIRMI as a PostDoc, I did my PhD at King’s College London, where I focused on energy efficient compliant actuation. Prior to that, I studied Applied Mathematics and worked as a quantitative trader in stock and futures market. I have been a fan of many Sci-Fi works featuring futuristic robot technologies, from giant robots (like Gundam and Pacific Rim) to cyborgs (eg Ghost in the Shell), so I decided to participate in the exiciting journey towards making great robots.

My research interests include robot skill learning, behavior trees, foundation models for robotics, robotic system architecture, and causality-aware autonomous decision making. My current focus is on robot skills development, acquisition and learning. I am leading a team working on large-scale collective robot learning and explore robot skill learning by leveraging scaling in physical robot experiments.

On the practical side, my goal is to build a robot skills and behavior coordination system that can be deployed in real flexible manufacturing use cases. Moreover, my dream is to make robots achieve human-level performance in tool-use and craftsmanship. On the theorectical side, I want to understand how intelligent species conceptualize the world and build their decision making system based on fundamental conpects about objects, actions and causes-and-effects.

(source: Personal webpage)

Research Interests

  • optimal control and reinforcement learning
  • optimal control for energy efficient elastic robots
  • compliant actuation
  • machine learning for embodied systems
  • energy-aware policy learning
  • collective learning

(source: RSI webpage)

Contact

Selected Publications

  • Liding Zhang, Yao Ling, Zhenshan Bing, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, Tree-Based Grafting Approach for Bidirectional Motion Planning With Local Subsets Optimization, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Liding Zhang, Sicheng Wang, Kuanqi Cai, Zhenshan Bing, Fan Wu, Chaoqun Wang, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, APT*: Asymptotically Optimal Motion Planning via Adaptively Prolated Elliptical R-Nearest Neighbors, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Liding Zhang, Kuanqi Cai, Yu Zhang, Zhenshan Bing, Chaoqun Wang, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, Estimated Informed Anytime Search for Sampling-Based Planning via Adaptive Sampler, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Jicong Ao, Fan Wu, Yansong Wu, Abdalla Swikir, Sami Haddadin, LLM-as-BT-Planner: Leveraging LLMs for Behavior Tree Generation in Robot Task Planning, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Yansong Wu, Zongxie Chen, Fan Wu, Lingyun Chen, Liding Zhang, Zhenshan Bing, Abdalla Swikir, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, TacDiffusion: Force-Domain Diffusion Policy for Precise Tactile Manipulation, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Kejia Chen, Zheng Shen, Yue Zhang, Lingyun Chen, Fan Wu, Zhenshan Bing, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, LEMMo-Plan: LLM-Enhanced Learning from Multi-Modal Demonstration for Planning Sequential Contact-Rich Manipulation Tasks, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Liding Zhang, Yankun Wei, Kuanqi Cai, Zhenshan Bing, Yuan Meng, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, CIT: Context-Based Biased Batch-Sampling for Almost-Surely Asymptotically Optimal Motion Planning, 2025. [Project Page]
  • Peter So, Andriy Sarabakha, Fan Wu, Utku Culha, Fares J. Abu-Dakka, Sami Haddadin, Digital Robot Judge: Building a Task-Centric Performance Database of Real-World Manipulation With Electronic Task Boards, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Kübra Karacan, Robin Jeanne Kirschner, Hamid Sadeghian, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, Tactile Robot Programming: Transferring Task Constraints into Constraint-Based Unified Force-Impedance Control, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Kejia Chen, Zhenshan Bing, Yansong Wu, Fan Wu, Liding Zhang, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, Real-time Contact State Estimation in Shape Control of Deformable Linear Objects under Small Environmental Constraints, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Yansong Wu, Fan Wu, Lingyun Chen, Kejia Chen, Samuel Schneider, Lars Johannsmeier, Zhenshan Bing, Fares J. Abu-Dakka, Alois Knoll, Sami Haddadin, 1 kHz Behavior Tree for Self-adaptable Tactile Insertion, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Kübra Karacan, Anran Zhang, Hamid Sadeghian, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, Visuo-Tactile Exploration of Unknown Rigid 3D Curvatures by Vision-Augmented Unified Force-Impedance Control, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Liding Zhang, Zhenshan Bing, Kejia Chen, Lingyun Chen, Kuanqi Cai, Yu Zhang, Fan Wu, Peter Krumbholz, Zhilin Yuan, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, Flexible Informed Trees (FIT*): Adaptive Batch-Size Approach in Informed Sampling-Based Path Planning, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Samuel Schneider, Yansong Wu, Lars Johannsmeier, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, A Scalable Platform for Robot Learning and Physical Skill Data Collection, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Jingyun Zhao, Birgit Vogel-Heuser, Jicong Ao, Yansong Wu, Liding Zhang, Fandi Hartl, Dominik Hujo, Zhenshan Bing, Fan Wu, Alois Knoll, Sami Haddadin, Bernd Vojanec, Timo Markert, André Kraft, Ontology Based AI Planning and Scheduling for Robotic Assembly, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Liding Zhang, Zhenshan Bing, Yu Zhang, Kuanqi Cai, Lingyun Chen, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, Elliptical K-Nearest Neighbors - Path Optimization via Coulomb's Law and Invalid Vertices in C-space Obstacles, 2024. [Project Page]
  • Andreas Frotzscher, Xiao Chen, Duy Lam Tran, Thore Goll, Hamid Sadeghian, Fan Wu, Martin Dehmel, Tommy Wohlfahrt, Matthias Riedl, Sami Haddadin, Self-Organization and Collaboration in Robotic Manufacturing Systems, 2023. [Project Page]
  • Kübra Karacan, Robin Jeanne Kirschner, Hamid Sadeghian, Fan Wu, Sami Haddadin, The Inherent Representation of Tactile Manipulation Using Unified Force-Impedance Control, 2023. [Project Page]
  • Elisabeth Rose Jensen, Reihaneh Mirjalili, Kim K. Peper, Dennis Ossadnik, Fan Wu, Jan Josef Lang, Matthias Martin, Florian Hetfleisch, Rainer Burgkart, Sami Haddadin, Individualized Training of Back Muscles Using Iterative Learning Control of a Compliant Balance Board, 2023. [Project Page]
  • Kejia Chen, Zhenshan Bing, Fan Wu, Yuan Meng, André Kraft, Sami Haddadin, Alois Knoll, Contact-Aware Shaping and Maintenance of Deformable Linear Objects With Fixtures, 2023. [Project Page]
  • Dennis Ossadnik, Mehmet Can Yildirim, Fan Wu, Abdalla Swikir, Hugo T. M. Kussaba, Saeed Abdolshah, Sami Haddadin, BSA - Bi-Stiffness Actuation for optimally exploiting intrinsic compliance and inertial coupling effects in elastic joint robots, 2022. [Project Page]
  • Xiao Chen, Lars Johannsmeier, Hamid Sadeghian, Erfan Shahriari, Martin Danneberg, Anselm Nicklas, Fan Wu, Gerhard P. Fettweis, Sami Haddadin, On the Communication Channel in Bilateral Teleoperation: An Experimental Study for Ethernet, WiFi, LTE and 5G, 2022. [Project Page]