Zhihao Cao

About

I am a master student at ETH Zürich, pursuing a master's degree in Computational Science and Engineering in the Department of Mathematics. I really love animals, especially cats. One of my dreams is to become financially independent so that I can finally adopt a cat and have a furry friend in my life.

Previously, I graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen with a bachelor's degree in Automation. I spent a wonderful time working at AIRS in 2023, and I was also fortunate to be a remote intern at Baidu Inc. working on deep learning from 2020 to 2023.

My current research focuses on multi-robot systems, cooperative manipulation, and the interaction and coordination mechanisms that enable efficient robotic teamwork.

News

Feb 2026 MCGS-SLAM is accepted to ICRA 2026. A multi-camera SLAM framework with Gaussian Splatting.
Feb 2023 Our work on Cable-Driven Parallel Robots is published in IEEE RA-L.

Publications

A collection of my research work.

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

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}
}

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

A collection of my course projects.

3D Thermo-mechanical Convection

Solving Partial Differential Equations in Parallel on GPUs · 2024

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

Code

Modeling Water Flow on the Sphere with Fourier Neural Operator

AI in the Sciences and Engineering · 2024

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

Code

Education

ETH Zürich

2023 – Present

M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering

Research Focus: Multi-Robot Systems, Interaction & Coordination in Robotics
Current GPA: 5.8 / 6.0

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen

2019 – 2023

B.Eng. in Automation

Research Focus: SLAM, Cable-Driven Parallel Robots, Reinforcement Learning
GPA: 90.3 / 100 · Outstanding Bachelor Degree Graduates

Honors & Awards

2023

Outstanding Bachelor Degree Graduates

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen

2020

Baidu AI Star Plan

Baidu Inc., Beijing

2020

ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (ABU Robocon)

National-level First Prize

2020

NXP Cup National University Students Intelligent Car Race

National-level Second Prize

Teaching

Advanced Topics in Control: Distributed Systems and Control

Teaching Assistant

Institut für Automatik, ETH Zürich

ControlMulti-Robot Systems

Service

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