I am currently a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), supervised by Prof. Lihua Xie from NTU and co-supervised by Dr. Yau Wei-Yun from Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. Before that, I received both my M. Eng. degree (2022) and B. Eng. degree (2019) from Zhejiang University (ZJU), under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Ronghao Zheng.

I am passionate about developing intelligent robotic systems that can understand, reason about, and act in the 3D real world, with consistent spatial awareness, long-term memory, and agile mobility. I believe physical intelligence is a crucial next step toward grounding and extending the capabilities of emerging language and vision foundation models, ultimately benefiting everyday life.

My research has primarily focused on robot planning and coordination using generative models, reinforcement learning, optimization, graph theory, and symbolic/formal methods. My research topics include active localization and mapping, planning under complex spatiotemporal constraints, and autonomous exploration, with an emphasis on real-world applications. More exciting research lies ahead. Feel free to reach out for discussions or collaborations!

Selected News

• [06/2026] Three paper got accepted by IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026! The acceptance rate drops to 36% this year. Congrats to Junhe Sheng, Jie Chen, and Yuteng Sun!
• [05/2025] My first-authored paper about line-of-sight maintenance was selected as the ICRA 2025 Best Conference Paper Award Finalist.
• [05/2025] I presented two papers about SLAM-aware exploration and line-of-sight maintenance at IEEE ICRA 2025 at Atlanta, USA.
• [01/2025] Three papers got accepted by IEEE ICRA 2025!
• [07/2024] One paper got accepted by IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024!
• [06/2024] One paper got accepted by IEEE RA-L!

Selected Projects

Robots as Tokens: Unified Diffusion Transformer for Coordinated Multi-Robot Trajectory Generation
Ruofei Bai, J Chen, Y Cai, J Li, WY Yau, L Xie
Submitted to CoRL 2026. [Paper] [Project]

Line-of-Sight-Constrained Multi-Robot Mapless Navigation via Polygonal Visible Regions
Ruofei Bai, S Yuan, X Xu, X Ji, X Li, H Guo, WY Yau, L Xie
Submitted to RA-L. [Paper] [Code]

Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning for Adaptive Diffusion Navigation Policies
J Sheng*, Ruofei Bai*, K Xu, R Liu, J Chen, S Yuan, WY Yau, L Xie
2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). [Paper]

TIDAL: Temporally Interleaved Diffusion and Action Loop for High-Frequency VLA Control
Y Sun, H Wang, Ruofei Bai, Z Li, J Li, M Yee, WY Yau
2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). [Paper]

ImagiNav: Scalable Embodied Navigation via Generative Visual Prediction and Inverse Dynamics
J Chen, Y Cai, Y Wang, Ruofei Bai, Y Cao, J Li, YW Yun, G Sartoretti
2026 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). [Paper]

Realm: Real-Time Line-of-Sight Maintenance in Multi-Robot Navigation with Unknown Obstacles
Ruofei Bai, S Yuan, K Li, H Guo, WY Yau, L Xie
2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). [Paper] [Code]
Best Paper Award Finalist

Graph-based Slam-Aware Exploration with Prior Topo-Metric Information
Ruofei Bai, H Guo, WY Yau, L Xie
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2024. [Paper] [Code]

Multi-Robot Active Graph Exploration with Reduced Pose-SLAM Uncertainty via Submodular Optimization
Ruofei Bai, S Yuan, H Guo, P Yin, WY Yau, L Xie
2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). [Paper] [Code]

Hierarchical Multi-Robot Strategies Synthesis and Optimization under Individual and Collaborative Temporal Logic Specifications
Ruofei Bai, R Zheng, M Liu, S Zhang
Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), 2022. [Paper]

Multi-Robot Task Planning under Individual and Collaborative Temporal Logic Specifications
Ruofei Bai, R Zheng, M Liu, S Zhang
2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). [Paper] [Code]