I’m a postdoc in the General Robotics Lab at Duke, working with Boyuan Chen. Most of my projects involve building a new robot. I design it, write the simulation it trains in, and stay with it until the learned controller works on the hardware. At Duke that has meant Argus, a 20-legged robot that moves in any orientation, as well as two humanoids and the Cartesian Hand, which manipulates objects using only linear joints. I’m currently mentoring three students on the second humanoid and the hand.

Before Duke I spent a year and a half at PX Robotics writing locomotion controllers for quadrupeds. Before that I did my Ph.D. at Columbia with Hod Lipson, building soft legged robots and the GPU simulator we used to tune their gaits.

Longer term, I want robots that can carry out long, precise physical tasks reliably. Each project so far covers one part of that.

Experience

09/2023 to present
Postdoctoral Associate · Duke University
General Robotics Lab, with Prof. Boyuan Chen.
02/2022 to 08/2023
Senior Machine Learning Engineer · PX Robotics Inc., Santa Clara, CA
Learned locomotion controllers deployed on the Unitree A1 and the company's Px2 quadruped, including a hierarchical controller pairing an RL policy with a model-based low-level controller.
12/2018 to 12/2020
Ph.D. Research · Columbia University
Creative Machines Lab, with Prof. Hod Lipson. Soft legged robots, including the Flexipod quadruped and a CUDA soft-body simulator.
02/2017 to 03/2018
M.S. Thesis Research · Columbia University
ROAR Lab, with Prof. Sunil Agrawal. Virtual reality tools for gait and navigation studies.

Education

  • Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University, 2022
  • M.S., Mechanical Engineering (Robotics), Columbia University, 2018
  • B.Eng., Machine Design, Manufacturing & Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2016
  • Visiting Scholar Program, UC San Diego, 2014 to 2015

Recognition & Service

  • Best Paper Award, Space Robotics Workshop at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026 (paper)
  • Innovation Award, ALIFE 2024 Virtual Creatures Competition, for Text2Robot
  • Nominee, 2026 Outstanding Postdoc Award, Duke University (24 nominees among 650 postdocs)
  • Patent application, Spherical Robot for All-Direction Movement and Active Sensing (U.S. Provisional 63/806,244 and PCT/US2026/028284), covering Argus
  • Patent application, Artificial Intelligence-Based Systems and Methods for Robot Tooling for Laboratory Automation (U.S. Provisional 64/069,387)
  • Session Chair and Session Co-Chair, IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026
  • Reviewer for IROS, ICRA, CoRL, IEEE-RAS Humanoids, IEEE RA-L, and Springer Nature journals
  • Cover articles in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing (2019) and Actuators (2020)
  • Member of Sigma Xi

Press & Talks

Contact

boxi.xia@duke.edu  ·  Google Scholar  ·  GitHub  ·  LinkedIn