Bio

Peng Gao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Maryland Robotics Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Gao’s research centers on collaborative autonomy to enable team awareness in multi-robot and human-autonomy teaming. His work aims to empower autonomous robots to collaboratively and independently understand unstructured environments and interpret the actions of both human and robotic teammates. This vision is designed to advance human-level collaboration in complex, open-world scenarios.

He has received the Best Paper Award for Agri-Robot at IROS 2023 and has published in top venues in robotics and machine learning, including Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), ICRA, IROS, ICML, AAAI, The International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), and Autonomous Robots (AuRo). Gao also serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) and the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

Area(s) of Expertise

Advanced Learning Technologies
Algorithms and Theory of Computation
Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents
Cyber-Physical Systems
Embedded and Real-Time Systems

Publications

• MMCD: Multi-Modal Collaborative Decision-Making for Connected Autonomy with Knowledge Distillation , (2025)
• Non-Overlap-Aware Egocentric Pose Estimation for Collaborative Perception in Connected Autonomy , (2025)

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