His work: robots that navigate spaces, reason about objects, and understand relationships.
SRI robotics researcher Tixiao Shan has been named one of Scientific American’s “Young American Scientists 2026.” The series celebrates early-career researchers who are on the frontier of technology innovation and scientific discovery.
A profile written by Scientific American editor-in-chief David M. Ewalt spotlights Shan’s work on autonomy, robotics, and AI. Shan’s research in SRI’s Center for Vision Technologies helps autonomous machines map and understand their environment so that when encountering a chair, for example, they understand what a chair is, that it can be moved, and how to interact with it appropriately.
His recent Graph2Nav framework enables robots to grasp relationships between objects, so that if asked to find a phone in a bedroom, the robot knows to look near a desk or bed.“In the near future, we can have such robots, especially for senior people who cannot move freely or who have trouble moving things around,” Shan says. “The robot can do that for them.”
Shan’s research builds on a deep legacy of robotics and AI expertise at SRI. From 1966 to 1972, for example, SRI researchers developed Shakey, a pioneering robot capable of planning, route-finding, and rearranging objects — the world’s first AI robot and a forerunner of everything from GPS to self-driving cars. Later work on Centibots — networked, autonomous robots — further shaped the future of robotics research. Today, researchers like Shan continue to push SRI’s robotics legacy forward.