Boxi Xia

Postdoctoral Associate, Duke University

I'm working toward robots that can carry out long, precise physical tasks reliably. I design and build the hardware, train the control in simulation, and run it on real robots. The projects below are the pieces I've built so far. Next is putting them together into robots that run multi-step tasks from start to finish.

I work in the General Robotics Lab at Duke with Prof. Boyuan Chen. I did my Ph.D. in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia with Prof. Hod Lipson, and before Duke I built learned locomotion controllers for quadrupeds at PX Robotics.

Email/Google Scholar/GitHub/LinkedIn

News

Sep 2026Our planetary mobility paper won the Best Paper Award at the Space Robotics Workshop at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh. At the main conference I chaired one manipulation session and co-chaired another.
Sep 2026Released three preprints: the Cartesian Hand, Duke Humanoid v2, and MARBLE, an amphibious rolling robot.
May 2026Argus published in Science Robotics. AP, Fortune, and IEEE Spectrum were among the outlets that covered it.

Older news

2026Nominated for Duke's 2026 Outstanding Postdoc Award (24 nominees among 650 postdocs).
May 2026Filed a PCT patent application for Argus and a U.S. provisional application on robot tooling for laboratory automation.
Sep 2025Duke Humanoid presented at IROS 2025.
May 2025Text2Robot presented at ICRA 2025, and a U.S. provisional patent application filed for Argus.
2024Text2Robot received the Innovation Award in the ALIFE 2024 Virtual Creatures Competition.

Research

* equal contribution

Dynamic Symmetry for Orientation-Independent Planetary Mobility

B. Xia^*, J. Liu^*, B. Chen

IROS 2026 Space Robotics Workshop

Best Paper Award

workshop website/paper

Planetary mobilityApplies dynamic symmetry to planetary surfaces: zero-shot trajectory tracking on simulated Mars and Moon terrain under reduced gravity.

Omnidirectional Amphibious Locomotion via Internal Mass Actuation

N. Weaver^*, B. Xia^*, L.-Y. Lo^*, Y. Huang, B. Chen

arXiv preprint, 2026

project page/paper/arXiv/code

Field roboticsA sealed spherical robot that rolls on land and moves across water by shifting three internal masses, with no separate drive for each medium.

The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers

B. Xia^*, B. Li^*, R. Shin, Z. Yang, J. Liu, B. Chen

arXiv preprint, 2026

project page/paper/arXiv/code

PrecisionA 7-DoF hand that uses only linear joints. It opens caps, pipettes, and drives screws on 35 lab, factory, and household objects, and two of them do bimanual lab work on a humanoid.

Visible-Reachable Workspace for Perception-Aware Humanoid Design

B. Xia, Z. Yang, R. Shin, B. Li, E. W.-H. Lu, J. Lee, J. Liu, B. Chen

arXiv preprint, 2026

project page/paper/arXiv/code

Perception for manipulationA 31-DoF humanoid whose two cameras move independently. It can see 97% of the space it can reach (38% with fixed cameras) and watch two separated targets while working on them.

CEER: Compliant End-Effector and Root Control as a Unified Interface for Hierarchical Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

X. Luo, X. Chen, X. Yin, H. Wu, B. Xia, Z. Chen, J. Li, B. Chen, X. Cheng

IROS 2026

project page/paper/arXiv

Loco-manipulationA compliant end-effector and root control interface for hierarchical humanoid loco-manipulation.

Extreme dynamic symmetry enables omnidirectional and multifunctional robots

J. Liu^*, B. Xia^*, B. Chen

Science Robotics, 2026

project page/paper/arXiv/DOI

RobustnessA 20-legged spherical robot built on dynamic symmetry, a design principle we introduced. It moves in any orientation, keeps going with up to three legs disabled, and climbs between walls under emulated lunar gravity.

The Duke Humanoid: Design and control for energy-efficient bipedal locomotion using passive dynamics

B. Xia, B. Li, J. Lee, M. Scutari, B. Chen

IROS 2025

paper/arXiv/DOI/code

Sim-to-realAn open-source 10-DoF biped. Its RL policy, trained in simulation, runs zero-shot on the hardware and uses passive dynamics to cut the cost of transport by up to 31%.