Chao (Frank) Xie

News

• Feb 2026

  Published Advancing Robotic Automation in Wood-Framed Construction Using Vision-Driven Adaptive Control published in Automation in Construction. DOI → Dataset →

• Feb 2026

  Dataset Released Released WFC Dataset — a high-resolution, high-fidelity benchmark dataset capturing real-world wood-frame construction scenes, with peer benchmark results. GitHub →

Advanced Robotics & Embodied AI

My research focuses on vision-driven closed-loop robotic systems for real-world manipulation and assembly, with a specific emphasis on construction-scale tasks. By integrating 6D pose estimation, pose-based visual servoing (PBVS), and reinforcement learning across both task planning and motion planning layers, the developed systems achieve high-precision execution under real-world uncertainty — including occlusion, geometric variability, and unstructured environments. My work emphasizes seamless sim-to-real transfer of intelligent policies from high-fidelity digital twins to large-scale industrial workstations.

Looking ahead, I am exploring how Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models can serve as high-level semantic planners to further extend these systems toward open-vocabulary instruction following and broader generalization — with the goal of enabling autonomous, high-precision assembly of large-scale architectural structures.

Featured Projects

Education

• University of Florida · Gainesville, FL Expected May 2027

  Ph.D. in Design, Construction and Planning · GPA: 3.97

  Full Scholarship & Graduate Assistantship

  Research: AI and robotics in construction, intelligent design methods, 3D perception, autonomous robotic systems.

• University of Florida · Gainesville, FL Dec 2023

  M.S. in Construction Management · GPA: 4.00

  Full Scholarship & Graduate Assistantship  ·  Academic Excellence Award — top graduate of the cohort

• Southwest Jiaotong University · Chengdu, China Jun 2013

  B.E. in Environmental Engineering

  B.E. in Economics (International Economics and Trade)

Awards & Honors

• Rinker School Building Construction Scholarship Fall 2025

• Impressive First — UF Coding Competition (Hackathon) Fall 2025

• Ingle Family Scholarship Spring 2025

• Rinker School Building Construction Scholarship Spring 2025

• Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society Spring 2025

• Jimmie Hinze Graduate Scholarship Fall 2024

• CM Masters / Graduate Academic Excellence Award Fall 2023

  1 recipient · University of Florida

• Sigma Lambda Chi (ΣΛΧ) International Construction Honor Society Fall 2023

Research Interests

• Embodied AI & VLA Models: Developing Vision-Language-Action architectures that bridge high-level semantic reasoning with low-level motor control for generalizable task planning.
• 3D Scene Understanding for Action: Engineering robust 6DoF object pose estimation and tracking algorithms using RGB-D data and point cloud geometry to enable precise manipulation.
• Active Perception & Object-level Reasoning: Leveraging geometric constraints and semantic priors to resolve state estimation under heavy occlusion and environmental uncertainty.
• Closed-loop Visual Servoing: Implementing adaptive control laws and real-time feedback loops for precision-critical assembly and construction-scale tasks.
• Robotic Assembly under Uncertainty: Addressing complex challenges in symmetry, tight tolerances, and imperfect components through perception-action coupling.
• Perception-Planning-Execution Co-design: Architecting integrated systems that ensure reliable deployment on large-scale industrial workstations.
• Digital Twins & Sim-to-Real Pipelines: Building high-fidelity simulations to facilitate the scalable development and transfer of intelligent robotic policies.

Selected Publications

Teaching

• BCN4612C — Construction Estimating 2

  Instructor · Taught every semester

• BCN5905 — Advanced Construction Technology (Autodesk-Funded Course)

  Course Creator and Instructor

Contact

I welcome collaboration and invited talk opportunities.