About Me
Welcome to my personal website! I’m Boxi Xia, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University working with Prof. Boyuan Chen in the General Robotics Lab.
Research
My research focuses on robot hardware design and control, with particular emphasis on legged locomotion systems including humanoids and soft robots. I develop learning-based control algorithms using reinforcement learning and build physics-based simulators to enable efficient robot design and control. My work spans the full pipeline from mechanical design and fabrication to simulation, learning, and real-world deployment.
Recent projects include designing the Duke Humanoid, a 10-DOF child-sized bipedal robot for energy-efficient locomotion using passive dynamics, and developing Text2Robot, a framework that uses generative AI to automatically design and manufacture quadrupedal robots from text descriptions.
Education
Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering – Columbia University, New York, NY (2021) Advisor: Prof. Hod Lipson Focus: Soft robotics, evolutionary computation, and machine learning for robot design
M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (Robotics Track) – Columbia University, New York, NY (2017) Focus: Robotics, control systems, and artificial intelligence
B.Eng. in Machine Design, Manufacturing & Automation – Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China (2016)
Professional Experience
Postdoctoral Researcher – Duke University (2023–present) Working on legged robot design, whole-body control, and morphology-varying reinforcement learning
Senior Machine Learning Engineer – XPENG Robotics, Santa Clara, CA (2022–2023) Developed vision-free end-to-end controllers and model-based locomotion controllers for quadrupedal robots
Areas of Expertise
- Robot hardware design and control
- Humanoid and legged locomotion
- Reinforcement learning and deep learning
- Soft robotics and actuators
- Physics simulation (CUDA, position-based dynamics)
- 3D printing and rapid prototyping
Professional Recognition
- Featured on Fox News (2025) for Text2Robot research
- Research Spotlight Talk, Responsible AI Symposium 2025 (Duke University)
- IEEE Spectrum Robotics coverage (2019) of the Flexipod soft robot
- Cover articles in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing (2019) and Actuators (2020)
- Member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society
- Inventor on provisional patent DU8960PROV (Argusbot), Duke University (2024)
Reviewer Service
Active reviewer for leading robotics conferences and journals including IROS, ICRA, CoRL, IEEE RA-L, and Springer Nature Journals.
Contact
Feel free to reach out through email or connect via the social links below. You can also find my publications on Google Scholar and code repositories on GitHub.