Liqian Ma

I’m a second-year Robotics Ph.D. student at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Prof. Yongxin Chen. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2024. I visited the Intelligent Control Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in 2023.

Research Interests

My research aims to enable agile and reliable motion generation for robots to perform diverse tasks. I work at the intersection of learning-based and model-based approaches:

• Learning-based: Imitation Learning, Sim-and-Real Co-training
• Model-based: Optimal Control, Stochastic Control, Formal Verification

I am especially interested in combining learning and model-based methods to make robots both adaptable and dependable when operating in complex real-world environments. For example, learning world models that support online planning, enabling robots to generalize to unseen environments, and using model-based planners to generate demonstrations that maximize data coverage for policy training.