ProfShoudong Huang

Shoudong Huang is a Professor in the School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at UTS and an internationally recognised researcher whose work focusses on mobile robot navigation in many different areas, including search and rescue, underwater, underground mining, and surgery.

He is motivated by a desire to see robots collaborating with humans and helping people in their daily lives, and his work has made significant contributions to the fields of mobile robot simultaneous localisation and mapping, operations research, nonlinear state estimation and nonlinear robust control.

He is Deputy Director of the UTS Robotics Institute (formerly Centre for Autonomous Systems), which specialises in robotics research that creates positive change for government, industry and the wider community.

Shoudong has published more than 200 research papers, and was named as one of the 100 Most Influential Scholars in the field of Robotics by research profiler Aminer in 2018. He was appointed as an Associate Editor for two leading journals in robotics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (from 2019 to 2022) and International Journal of Robotics Research (from 2024 to 2025). He was also appointed as an editor for one of the two main large robotics conferences, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from 2020 to 2022. He served as the Publication Chair for the top robotics conference, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2022, and the Registration Chair for RSS 2023. 

Since 2007, as a Chief Investigator, Shoudong has secured external research funding worth more than $4 million including three ARC Discovery grants, three ARC Linkage grants and one NHMRC Ideas grant. 

His research has received numerous awards, including the Chancellor’s Medal for Research Excellence in the 2020 UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Research Excellence, the Supervisor of the Year Award in the 2023 UTS Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Research Excellence, and the best paper award at the 14th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (2016). He was the winner of the 2019 New South Wales iAwards (Public Sector and Government), and he was a finalist in the ANSTO Eureka Prize for Innovative Use of Technology (2019).

He received Bachelor and Master degrees in Mathematics, and a PhD in Automatic Control, from China’s Northeastern University, in 1987, 1990, and 1998, respectively; worked as a post-doc researcher at the University of Hong Kong (1998-2000); worked at the ANU as a Research Fellow (2001-2003); and then joined the UTS node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems (2004).