Lan Wu

Dr Lan Wu received her PhD in Robotics from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2023, where she was a member of the Robotics Institute. Prior to commencing her PhD in 2019, she worked in industry as an electronic and mechatronic engineer and project leader, contributing to the development and deployment of multiple commercial sensing systems. From November 2022 to January 2026, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UTS Robotics Institute. In 2026, she joined the University of Western Australia as a Lecturer in Automation and Robotics.

Dr Wu’s research focuses on robotic perception, probabilistic mapping, alternative sensing, and autonomous navigation and manipulation. Her work develops principled probabilistic representations of spatial fields for robotics, enabling robots to perceive, model, and safely interact with complex and dynamic environments. Her research has applications in advanced manufacturing, agricultural robotics, assistive technologies for vision impairment, and intelligent robotic systems operating in unstructured environments.

Dr Wu has established a strong track record of research excellence, with publications in leading journals and conferences in robotics. She is the first author of a paper in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) (JCR Q1, top-tier journal in robotics and automation), which was further featured by the journal for its outstanding experimental results. Between 2020 and 2025, she published six papers in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) (JCR Q1), as well as additional papers in premier robotics conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), and the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

In 2024, Dr Wu was selected as a Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneer, a prestigious recognition awarded to a small cohort of outstanding early-career robotics researchers worldwide. She actively contributes to the robotics research community as a reviewer for leading journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), and the Journal of Field Robotics (JFR). She also serves as an Associate Editor for ICRA 2025 and ICRA 2026 in the localisation and mapping area.