Hanqing ZHAO

Please refer to the CV page for contact details.

Hanqing Zhao (he/him/il) is an Assistant Professor (Professeur adjoint) in the Département de génie électrique et de génie informatique of Université Laval. He is a member of the Laboratoire de Vision et Systèmes Numériques (LVSN). He is also an academic member of Mila, IID, REPARTI, and CERVIM.

Hanqing began his academic journey at the École Centrale de Pékin. He earned Ingénieur civil en informatique degree from École Polytechnique de Bruxelles (Université libre de Bruxelles), supervised by Marco Dorigo. He interned at Nokia Bell Labs Antwerp with Jean-François Macq and Christoph Stevens. He received Ph.D. in Computer Science (robotics) from McGill University, supervised by Gregory Dudek and Xue Liu. Before joining Université Laval, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MIST Lab of École Polytechnique de Montréal, supervised by Giovanni Beltrame.

His research focuses on enabling robots to accomplish complex tasks in place of human effort, while remaining resilient to faults and external disturbances. His current work centers on two directions: (i) consensus-based multi-robot control, using shared consensus systems (e.g., blockchain and smart contracts) for decentralized robot coordination, representation, and planning; and (ii) model-based reinforcement learning for human–robot interaction, where model-based RL is used to adapt parallel-robot controllers, enabling effective physical assistance to humans.

news

Apr 30, 2026	Proud to receive the NSERC Discovery Grant for the next 5 years.
Oct 01, 2025	Our paper “Swarm Oracle: Trustless Blockchain Agreements through Robot Swarms” is now available as an arXiv preprint.
Aug 18, 2025	Our paper “A Blockchain Framework for Equitable and Secure Task Allocation in Robot Swarms” has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), preprint version.
Jul 01, 2025	I will be joining Université Laval as a Professeur adjoint (Assistant Professor) in September 2025.

selected publications

2025

RA-L

A Blockchain Framework for Equitable and Secure Task Allocation in Robot Swarms

Hanqing Zhao, Alexandre Pacheco, Giovanni Beltrame, and 3 more authors

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025

Bib PDF Video Code

@article{zhao2025blockchain,
  title = {A Blockchain Framework for Equitable and Secure Task Allocation in Robot Swarms},
  author = {Zhao, Hanqing and Pacheco, Alexandre and Beltrame, Giovanni and Liu, Xue and Dorigo, Marco and Dudek, Gregory},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)},
  pages = {10862-10869},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {IEEE},
}

2023

IROS

A Generic Framework for Byzantine-tolerant Consensus Achievement in Robot Swarms

Hanqing Zhao, Alexandre Pacheco, Volker Strobel, and 4 more authors

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

Bib PDF Video

@inproceedings{zhao2023generic,
  title = {A Generic Framework for Byzantine-tolerant Consensus Achievement in Robot Swarms},
  author = {Zhao, Hanqing and Pacheco, Alexandre and Strobel, Volker and Reina, Andreagiovanni and Liu, Xue and Dudek, Gregory and Dorigo, Marco},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages = {8839--8846},
  year = {2023},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

IROS

Zero-Shot Fault Detection for Manipulators Through Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Hanqing Zhao, Xue Liu, and Gregory Dudek

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{zhao2023zero,
  title = {Zero-Shot Fault Detection for Manipulators Through Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Zhao, Hanqing and Liu, Xue and Dudek, Gregory},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages = {3582--3589},
  year = {2023},
  volume = {10},
  issue = {10},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

2022

IROS

Behaviour Learning with Adaptive Motif Discovery and Interacting Multiple Model

Hanqing Zhao, Travis Manderson, Hao Zhang, and 2 more authors

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{zhao2022behaviour,
  title = {Behaviour Learning with Adaptive Motif Discovery and Interacting Multiple Model},
  author = {Zhao, Hanqing and Manderson, Travis and Zhang, Hao and Liu, Xue and Dudek, Gregory},
  booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  pages = {10788--10794},
  year = {2022},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

2021

MMAR

General Dynamic Neural Networks for the Adaptive Tuning of an Omni-Directional Drive System for Reactive Swarm Robotics

Hanqing Zhao, Marco Dorigo, and Michael Allwright

In International Conference on Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics (MMAR), 2021

Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{zhao2021general,
  title = {General Dynamic Neural Networks for the Adaptive Tuning of an Omni-Directional Drive System for Reactive Swarm Robotics},
  author = {Zhao, Hanqing and Dorigo, Marco and Allwright, Michael},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics (MMAR)},
  pages = {79--84},
  year = {2021},
  organization = {IEEE},
}