Yilin Cai
Ph.D. Student in Robotics @ Georgia Tech, Poet, Roboticist
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
| Jan 27, 2025 | One paper accepted to ICRA 2025. |
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| Jan 4, 2025 | Give a talk on elephant trunk intelligence at a symposium of SICB 2025 Anual Meeting at Atlanta. |
| Dec 19, 2024 | One paper on Modular Self-Reconfigurable Continuum Robot accepted to RA-L. |
| Jun 30, 2024 | One paper accepted to IROS 2024. |
| Jun 3, 2024 | Present my work at PlanRobo Workshop at ICAPS 2024. |
| May 30, 2023 | I presented my papers at ICRA 2023, London (Talk) 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. |
Selected Publications
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Opt2skill: Imitating dynamically-feasible whole-body trajectories for versatile humanoid loco-manipulationarXiv preprint arXiv:2409.20514 2025 -
Propagative Distance Optimization for Motion PlanningInternational Conference on Robotics and Automationv (ICRA) 2025 -
Multi-Agent Teamwise Cooperative Path Finding and Traffic Intersection CoordinationIEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2024 -
Propagative Distance Optimization for Constrained Inverse KinematicsInternational Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) 2024 -
Statics Modeling of Discrete Joint Surgical Probes with Tendon-based StiffeningInternational Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR) 2023
