About Me

I am a PhD student at GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania advised by Prof. Nadia Figueroa. My research interests lie primarily in the areas of machine learning, control theory, and perception with an emphasis on physical human-robot interaction.

Education

penn University of Pennsylvania, GRASP Lab
08/2022 - 05/2027
Ph.D. in Robotics/Mechanical Engineering
nw Northwestern University
09/2020 - 12/2021
M.S. in Robotics
uiuc University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
08/2016 - 05/2020
B.S. in Aerospace Engineering with Minor in Computer Science

Publications

Task Generalization with Stability Guarantees via Elastic Dynamical System Motion Policies

Task Generalization with Stability Guarantees via Elastic Dynamical System Motion Policies

Tianyu Li, Nadia Figueroa

[website]

Accepted to CoRL2023

A dynamical system based motion policy LfD method with stability guarantees that can generalize to new task configurations without new demonstrations

Past Projects

Planning & Prediction with user preference via deep inverse reinforcement learning

Planning & Prediction with user preference via deep inverse reinforcement learning

[website]

Using maximum entropy deep IRL to learn agent preference in continuous environment path planning

Using Rethink Sawyer Robot Arm to Play Yoyo

Using Rethink Sawyer Robot Arm to Play Yoyo

[website]

Developed software and hardware pipeline to play yoyo with visual feedback control on the Sawyer Robot arm

Real-time KL-Ergodic Distribution-based Model Predictive Control

Real-time KL-Ergodic Distribution-based Model Predictive Control

[website]

Model predictive control with the ability to match or avoid distributions

EKF-SLAM with Machine Learning

EKF-SLAM with Machine Learning

[website]

Implementation of landmark-based EKF-SLAM with unsupervised learning and unknown data association using ROS in C++ from scratch.

Data-driven Receding Horizon Control with the Koopman Operator

Data-driven Receding Horizon Control with the Koopman Operator

[website]

Performed receding horizon control using data-driven approach with small data in a continuous space

Swarm Multi-Agent Distributed Coordination

Swarm Multi-Agent Distributed Coordination

[website]

Implemented distributed swarm robotics motion coordination algorithms based on bio-inspired ideas from research papers