Fangqiang Ding

about me

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, working with Dr. Hermano Igo Krebs, director of The 77 Lab. Before MIT, I worked with Dr. Or Litany at Technion as a Postdoctoral Fellow. I was honored to be awarded a 2025 RSS Pioneer for my work on robust spatial perception for mobile robotics. I received my Ph.D. in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, supervised by Dr. Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, and my B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from Tongji University.

My research agenda centers on Physical AI, which integrates advanced artifcial intelligence with physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, robots, xR, industrial and IoT devices) to enable them to perceive, understand, and interact in the physical world. My long-term vision is a human–machine symbiotic ecosystem where human and embodied intelligence coexist, collaborate and co-evolve. Achieving this vision requires systems that are robust under changing conditions, responsible around humans, and affordable to deploy at scale. My current work advances this goal along three key axes: (i) condition-adaptive: maintaining robustness across illumination, weather, and environmental changes; (ii) privacy-aware: protecting user identity and sensitive content in privacy-critical applications; (iii) cost-effective: reducing reliance on expensive sensors and compute devices and costly real-world data collection and manual labeling.