Shaoxiong (Shawn) Wang

Member of Technical Staff @ Tacta

Email: wsxiong [at] gmail (dot) com
Google Scholar / CV

I work on Contact-Rich Manipulation at Tacta, a robotics startup in the Bay area, focusing on Tactile Sensing and Dexterous Manipulation.

I finished my Ph.D. in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) supervised by Prof. Edward H. Adelson. I also had the opportunity to work with Prof. Alberto Rodriguez. I recieved my B.E. degree from Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University.

During Ph.D., I studied Tactile Perception & Manipulation, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning.

Previously, I was fortunate to work in Knowledge Engineering Group, Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Jie Tang; Facebook AI Research, advised by Prof. Roberto Calandra.

Publications

Tactile-Reactive Roller Grasper

Shenli Yuan*, Shaoxiong Wang*, Radhen Patel, Megha Tippur, Connor Yako, Mark R. Cutkosky, Edward H. Adelson†, Kenneth Salisbury†
(*,† indicates equal contributions)

TRO'25
[Paper] [Project Page]

DTact: A Vision-Based Tactile Sensor that Measures High-Resolution 3D Geometry Directly from Darkness

Changyi Lin, Ziqi Lin, Shaoxiong Wang, Huazhe Xu

ICRA'23
[Paper] [Project Page]

IROS’22
[Paper]

TACTO: A Fast, Flexible, and Open-Source Simulator for High-Resolution Vision-Based Tactile Sensors

Shaoxiong Wang, Michael Lambeta, Po-Wei Chou, Roberto Calandra

RA-L and ICRA’22
(NeurIPS'20 Workshop, Robot Learning; Deep Reinforcement Learning)
[Paper] [Code]

GelSight Wedge: Measuring High-Resolution 3D Contact Geometry with a Compact Robot Finger

Shaoxiong Wang, Yu She, Branden Romero, Edward H. Adelson

ICRA'21
[Paper] [Project Page]

PyTouch: A Machine Learning Library for Touch Processing

Michael Lambeta, Huazhe Xu, Jingwei Xu, Po-Wei Chou, Shaoxiong Wang, Trevor Darrell, Roberto Calandra

ICRA'21
[Paper] [Code]

SwingBot: Learning Physical Features from In-Hand Tactile Exploration for Dynamic Swing-up Manipulation

Chen Wang*, Shaoxiong Wang*, Branden Romero, Filipe Veiga, Edward H. Adelson

IROS'20 Best Paper Award
[Paper] [Project Page] [MIT CSAIL News]

Cable Manipulation with a Tactile-Reactive Gripper

Yu She*, Shaoxiong Wang*, Siyuan Dong*, Neha Sunil, Alberto Rodriguez, Edward H. Adelson

RSS'20 Best Paper Award Finalist
IJRR'21
[Paper] [Project Page] [MIT News]

3D Shape Perception from Monocular Vision, Touch, and Shape Priors

Shaoxiong Wang*, Jiajun Wu*, Xingyuan Sun, Wenzhen Yuan, William T. Freeman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Edward H. Adelson

IROS'18
[Paper] [Project Page]

Active Clothing Material Perception using Tactile Sensing and Machine Learning

Wenzhen Yuan, Yuchen Mo, Shaoxiong Wang, Edward H. Adelson

ICRA’18
[Paper][Data] [Project Page]

Connecting Look and Feel: Associating the visual and tactile properties of physical materials

Wenzhen Yuan*, Shaoxiong Wang*, Siyuan Dong, Edward H. Adelson

CVPR’17 Oral
[Paper][Data][Project Page]

Active Zero-Shot Learning

Sihong Xie, Shaoxiong Wang, Philip S. Yu

CIKM’16
[Paper][Data]

Side Projects

MIT 6.943[J] How To Make (Almost) Anything

Teleoperation with force feedback.

Features:

Micro-controller : ATmega16U4

USB-support : Based on LUFA USB library

Force Sensing : Hall-effect sensors & magnet

3D-Printed : Cable-driven robot hand, Yale Openhand
[Video] [Website]

Music Generation with Recurrent Neural Network

1st Place in Microsoft Campus Elite Program News
Grand Prize in 35th Tsinghua Challenge Cup (top 6 among 381 teams) News

A comprehensive music generation system based on recurrent neural network. It generates music automatically driven by data and is embedded with rich music knowledge.

Shaoxiong (Shawn) Wang 2022