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About

Zhiqin Cheng is a robotics researcher whose work advances the frontiers of multi-robot coordination, autonomous navigation, and industrial inspection. His most impactful contribution, “Towards Efficient Distributed Collision Avoidance for Heterogeneous Mobile Robots” (10 citations), tackles the complex challenge of enabling robots of varying sizes and motion constraints to navigate safely among each other and static obstacles—a critical capability for real-world deployments. Cheng has also made significant strides in robotic middleware, developing *GraphWare* (4 citations) and *ManiWare* (3 citations), which are graph-based and manipulator-focused platforms, respectively, that dramatically simplify the development of cooperative multi-robot and manipulator team applications. In the domain of infrastructure maintenance, he designed a deformable in-pipe inspection robot capable of adapting to various pipe diameters (4 citations), addressing the urgent need for automated inspection of aging urban pipelines. With a growing citation record exceeding 20, Cheng’s work is notable for its practical, systems-level approach—bridging theoretical algorithms with deployable software and hardware—making him a rising figure in distributed robotics and industrial automation.