Zhihao Cao

Publications

A collection of my research work.

RA-L 2026

PAINT: Partner-Agnostic Intent-Aware Cooperative Transport with Legged Robots

Zhihao Cao*, Tianxu An*, Chenhao Li, Stelian Coros, Marco Hutter

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026

Paper arXiv Media

@article{cao2026paint,
  title   = {PAINT: Partner-Agnostic Intent-Aware Cooperative Transport With Legged Robots},
  author  = {Cao, Zhihao and An, Tianxu and Li, Chenhao and Coros, Stelian and Hutter, Marco},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume  = {11},
  number  = {11},
  pages   = {12312--12319},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.1109/LRA.2026.3730304}
}

T-ASE 2026

MAGS-SLAM: Monocular Multi-Agent Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Geometrically and Photometrically Consistent Reconstruction

Zhihao Cao*, Qi Shao*, Shuhao Zhai*, Jing Zhang, Anh Nguyen, Hesheng Wang, Baoru Huang

IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), 2026

Paper arXiv Media Data

@article{cao2026mags,
  title   = {MAGS-SLAM: Monocular Multi-Agent Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Geometrically and Photometrically Consistent Reconstruction},
  author  = {Cao, Zhihao and Shao, Qi and Zhai, Shuhao and Zhang, Jing and Nguyen, Anh and Wang, Hesheng and Huang, Baoru},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.1109/TASE.2026.3746179}
}

ICRA 2026

MCGS-SLAM: A Multi-Camera SLAM Framework using Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Mapping

Zhihao Cao, Hanyu Wu, Li Wa Tang, Zizhou Luo, Wei Zhang, Marc Pollefeys, Zihan Zhu, Martin R. Oswald

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026

Paper arXiv Media Code

@article{cao2025mcgs,
  title   = {MCGS-SLAM: A multi-camera SLAM framework using Gaussian Splatting for high-fidelity mapping},
  author  = {Cao, Zhihao and Wu, Hanyu and Tang, Li Wa and Luo, Zizhou and Zhang, Wei and Pollefeys, Marc and Zhu, Zihan and Oswald, Martin R},
  journal = {IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.48550/arXiv.2509.14191}
}

RA-L 2023

Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance for Cable-Driven Parallel Robots with Mobile Bases via Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning

Yuming Liu*, Zhihao Cao*, Hao Xiong, Junfeng Du, Huanhui Cao, Lin Zhang

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023

Paper Media

@article{liu2023dynamic,
  title     = {Dynamic obstacle avoidance for cable-driven parallel robots with mobile bases via sim-to-real reinforcement learning},
  author    = {Liu, Yuming and Cao, Zhihao and Xiong, Hao and Du, Junfeng and Cao, Huanhui and Zhang, Lin},
  journal   = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume    = {8},
  number    = {3},
  pages     = {1683--1690},
  year      = {2023},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi       = {10.1109/LRA.2023.3241801}
}

Projects.

The 20th ROBOCON

The 20th ROBOCON is a robotics competition inspired by the ancient Chinese game Touhu, where each team independently designs robots to score by throwing arrows into pots while balancing accuracy, strategy, and defense.

Watch the video

Solving PDEs in Parallel on GPUs · 2024

3D Thermo-mechanical Convection

A GPU-parallel solver for 3D thermo-mechanical convection, implemented in Julia with distributed multi-GPU computation.

View the code

AI in the Sciences and Engineering · 2024

Modeling Water Flow on the Sphere with Fourier Neural Operator

A Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) that learns shallow-water dynamics on the sphere, capturing global flow patterns.

View the code

Education.

2023 – Present

ETH Zürich

M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering

Current GPA 5.8 / 6.0

Multi-Robot SystemsInteraction & Coordination in Robotics

2019 – 2023

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen

B.Eng. in Automation

GPA 90.3 / 100 · Outstanding Bachelor Degree Graduates

SLAMCable-Driven Parallel RobotsReinforcement Learning

Honors & awards.

Outstanding Bachelor Degree Graduates

2023 · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen
Baidu AI Star Plan

2020 · Baidu Inc., Beijing
ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (ABU Robocon)

2020 · National-level First Prize
NXP Cup National University Students Intelligent Car Race

2020 · National-level Second Prize

Teaching & service.

Teaching · Spring 2025

Advanced Topics in Control: Distributed Systems and Control

Teaching Assistant

Institut für Automatik, ETH Zürich

ControlMulti-Robot Systems

Service

Reviewer

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)