About
The laboratory, the paper, and the exhibition room are not separate domains here. They are three ways of staging the same question: what kind of intelligence becomes visible when machines have bodies, limits, and public consequences.
Researcher / artist / builder of machine behaviour
I work on how unlike machine bodies learn to share a world without being reduced to the same logic.
I am Yuan Gao (高源), a researcher and artist working across robotics, machine learning, and public installation. I currently lead research on heterogeneous multi-robot systems at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics / The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
The central question in my work is simple to state and difficult to solve: what happens when robots with different sensors, morphologies, and movement grammars must coordinate inside one shared system? Humanoids, quadrupeds, drones, and wheeled platforms do not read the world in the same way. Building cooperation across them means dealing with disagreement, asymmetry, negotiation, and temporary alliance rather than pretending they are interchangeable.
Before Shenzhen, I completed my Ph.D. at Uppsala University under the guidance of Prof. Danica Kragic and Prof. Ginevra Castellano. That period shaped my conviction that the most compelling robotics questions are never only technical. They are also questions of interpretation, trust, embodiment, and public meaning.
When machines learn to watch us as closely as we watch them, will we still recognize ourselves?
Four recurring questions that anchor the papers, essays, and installations.
Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems
Coordination among robots that do not share the same morphology, sensing stack, or action space.
Robot Learning
Adaptation, reinforcement learning, and meta-learning for systems that must improvise in changing environments.
Embodied Intelligence
The claim that intelligence cannot be separated from having a body, a material situation, and a point of view.
Human-Robot Interaction
Trust, distance, interpretation, and the changing social contract between human and machine agents.