👋🏼 Hi there, I am Zhen Hao!

I am a first-year Robotics PhD student @ Robotics Department, University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Bernadette Bucher and part of the amazing Mapping and Motion Lab! My research interests lies in Embodied Navigation, Interactive Object Search, Physical Intelligence, Skills Acquisition and Adaptation, 3D Path and Motion Planning, Robot Learning & Foundation Models. My PhD journey will be fully-funded through the A*STAR National Science Scholarship PhD!

Previously, I am a Robotics Research Engineer @ Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and a member of Embodied Intelligence Task Force in A*STAR. I have spent great time working with Dr. Michael Chuah on advancing legged robot capabilities and pushing boundaries in Physical Intelligence. I have earned a B.Eng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering with honors (Highest Distinction) from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. My final year thesis has been supervised by Prof. Xie Lihua on Vision-based Robot Navigation via DRL.

I envision mobile robots go anywhere anytime autonomously and intelligently with understanding of self and environment, leveraging the power of machine learning to enhance embodied skills acquisition and adaptation.

Feel free to reach out via email if you would like to connect/collaboration/discuss!

🔥 News

2026.09: Released PhyGS, a physically grounded scene-generation framework, and ForageBench, a benchmark for interactive object search.
2026.05: Excited to join NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Summer Robotics Intern 2026, working on problems related to embodied AI, robot task learning, and autonomy 🚀
2025.09: Featured in A*STAR Graduate Academy’s new series, reflecting on my research path and experience as part of the A*STAR family. Hopefully it bring inspiration the next-generation roboticsts! Big shout out to my mentor, Michael!
2025.07: Proud to share the team has been selected for NVIDIA Academic Grant Program on “Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Safe Locomotion with Differentiable Simulation”, lead by Prof. Shi Fan (NUS), Dr. Michael Chuah (A*STAR)
2025.04: Excited to share that I will be starting my PhD journey this fall at the Robotics Department, UofM under Prof. Bernadette Bucher!
2025.03: Proud to announce the team has been awarded the 2024 A*STAR Career Development Fund (CDF) on ”Towards Physical Intelligence: Embodiment-Aware Transformer Model for Legged Robots”
2024.06: Extremely honoured to be awarded the A*STAR National Science Scholarship PhD!

📝 Publications

CVPR 2026 Workshop

PhyGS generated scenes and Spot robot simulation-to-real deployment

PhyGS: Physically-Grounded Controllable Scene Generation

Aparajito Saha, Zhen Hao Gan, Jinjia Guo, Jacob Skwirsk, Jeremy Acheampong, Anton Arapin, Chahyon Ku, Yue Hu, Nima Fazeli, Bernadette Bucher

CVPR Workshop on Multi-Agent Embodied Intelligent Systems, 2026

Project · Paper · Code

PhyGS generates controllable, photorealistic, and physically interactive building-scale scenes in IsaacSim, with a hardware abstraction for sim-to-real deployment on Boston Dynamics Spot.

2026

ForageBench interactive object search task with navigation and manipulation

ForageBench: A Photorealistic, Physically Grounded Benchmark for Interactive Object Search

Aparajito Saha, Zhen Hao Gan, Jinjia Guo, Jacob Skwirsk, Jeremy Acheampong, Anton Arapin, Chahyon Ku, Yue Hu, Nima Fazeli, Bernadette Bucher

2026

Project · Paper · Code

ForageBench evaluates interactive object search across 25 house-scale scenes and 100 episodes, combining long-horizon navigation with fine-grained physical interaction.

🎖 Honors and Awards

2025.07: ”Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Safe Locomotion with Differentiable Simulation”, NVIDIA Academic Grant Program
2025.03: ”Towards Physical Intelligence: Embodiment-Aware Transformer Model for Legged Robots”, 2024 A*STAR Career Development Fund (CDF)
2024.06: A*STAR National Science Scholarship (NSS-PhD, 5-yr funding for Ph.D. study), Singapore
2019.08: Dean List’s Academic Year 2018/2019 (Top 5% of the Cohort)
2019.06: NTU EEE Partial Financial Award for GEM Explorer
2018.08: Dean List’s Academic Year 2017/2018 (Top 5% of the Cohort)
2017.07: GCE A-Level High Achiever Award (4A*)