Yilin Cai

Ph.D. Student in Robotics @ Georgia Tech, Poet, Roboticist

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I am a Ph.D. student in Robotics at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Dr. Yue Chen. Before joining Georgia Tech, I received my master’s degree in Robotic Systems Development (MRSD) at the Robotic Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where I worked in Biorobotics Lab with Prof. Howie Choset. I received my B.Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering (Hsue-shen Tsien Honor Class) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in 2020.

My research interest lies in general medical robots and robot manipulation. Particularly, I focus on surgical robot system design, modeling and planning for continuum robots, and robotic grippers for in-hand manipulation. I also study control and planning for autonomous driving and SLAM.

Additionally, I was fortunate to work with Profs. Kenneth Salisbury, Gregory Chirikjian and Zhinan Zhang before.

News

May 30, 2023 I presented my papers at ICRA 2023, London (video) and won the Outstanding Manipulation Paper Award.
Jan 31, 2023 The paper on statics modeling of medical snake was accepted to ISMR 2023.
Jan 27, 2023 Our master’s project on autonomous Zamboni was highlighted by CMU News.
Jan 17, 2023 Two papers, “Adaptive Robot Hand with Active Surfaces” and “DytanVO” were accepted to ICRA 2023.
Mar 7, 2022 My bachalor thesis on Rotating Microneedles was published in Research (Science Partner Journal, IF=11.036).
Aug 30, 2021 Finished my intern at Ronovo Surgical. Started my journey at CMU RI.

Publications

  1. In-Hand Manipulation in Power Grasp: Design of an Adaptive Robot Hand with Active Surfaces
    Winner, Outstanding Manipulation Paper Award; Finalist, Outstanding Conference Paper Award
    Yilin Cai, and Shenli Yuan
    International Conference on Robotics and Automationv (ICRA) 2023
  2. Statics Modeling of Discrete Joint Surgical Probes with Tendon-based Stiffening
    Yilin Cai, Andrew Orekhov, and Howie Choset
    International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR) 2023
  3. DytanVO: Joint Refinement of Visual Odometry and Motion Segmentation in Dynamic Environments
    Shihao Shen, Yilin Cai, Wenshan Wang, and Sebastian Scherer
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023
  4. Identifying Human Grasp Properties During Robot-to-Human Handovers
    Paul Pacaud, Etienne Chassaing, Yilin Cai, Connor Yako, and Kenneth Salisbury
    IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC) 2023
  5. Trajectory Optimization Warm-Started by Multi-Objective Graph Search with Application to Planning for Navigation in Complex Terrains
    Zhongqiang Ren, Yilin Cai, Sivakumar Rathinam, Maxim Likhachev, and Howie Choset
    2022
  6. Bioinspired Rotation Microneedles for Accurate Transdermal Positioning and Ultraminimal-Invasive Biomarker Detection with Mechanical Robustness
    Yilin Cai, Shiyi Huang, Zhinan Zhang, Jiazheng Zhang, Xingyue Zhu, Xiaoxiang Chen, and Xianting Ding
    Research 2022
  7. A Steerable Cross-axis Notched (SCAN) Continuum Manipulator
    Yilin Cai, Xiaojie Ai, Anzhu Gao, and Weidong Chen
    2021
  8. Cross-Modal Fusion Between Data in SAXS and Cryo-EM for Biomolecular Structure Determination
    Shengnan Lyu, Christian Wülker, Yuqing Pan, Amitesh S Jayaraman, Jianhao Zheng, Yilin Cai, and Gregory S Chirikjian
    NYC Computational Cryo-EM Summer Workshop 2019