Xiaoming Zhao

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Dartmouth College, advised by Prof. Alberto Quattrini Li in the Reality and Robotics Lab.

I work with marine robotics, developing perception systems that let autonomous underwater vehicles understand, localize, and reconstruct environments where conventional sensing degrades. My interests include:

• Marine & underwater robotics — Perception and autonomy for AUVs and surface platforms operating in GPS-denied and visually degraded underwater settings, including field deployment and validation of these systems in ocean conditions.
• Vision-based 3D reconstruction — Neural and differentiable scene representations such as NeRF and Gaussian Splatting, including acoustic augmented rendering.
• Perception & SLAM — Simultaneous localization and mapping and state estimation for underwater navigation, integrating acoustic odometry with visual-inertial methods to maintain reliable pose estimates.
• Multi-sensor fusion — Tightly coupled integration of heterogeneous sensors, such as 3D sonar, cameras, IMU, and DVL, into unified estimation frameworks.