I received my Master of Science in Robotics (MSR) degree from CMU biorobotics lab, advised by Prof. Howie Choset and in collaboration with my thesis comittee member Prof. Guanya Shi. Before joining CMU, I received my B.Eng. degree in Vehicle Enigineering from Tongji University (China). My current research focuses on (1) learning and applied optimization for robotic motion control and (2) robotic system design.

Selected Research Projects

NavMoE: Hybrid Model- and Learning-based Traversability Estimation for Local Navigation via Mixture of Experts
(* for equal contribution) Botao He*, Amir Hossein Shahidzadeh*, Yu Chen*, Jiayi Wu, Tianrui Guan, Guofei Chen, Dinesh Manocha, Howie Choset, Glen Chou, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos.
Preprint
[Paper]

Propagative Distance Optimization for Motion Planning
Yu Chen, Jinyun Xu, Yilin Cai, Ting-Wei Wong, Zhongqiang Ren, Howie Choset, Guanya Shi.
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
[Paper]

Propagative Distance Optimization for Constrained Inverse Kinematics
Yu Chen, Yilin Cai, Jinyun Xu, Zhongqiang Ren, Guanya Shi, Howie Choset.
The 16th International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2024
[Paper]

Graph-Propagation-based Kinematic Algorithm for In-pipe Truss Robots
Yu Chen, Jinyun Xu, Yilin Cai, Shuo Yang, Ben Brown, Fujun Ruan, Yizhu Gu, Howie Choset, Lu Li.
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
[Paper] | [Code]

Semi-Supervised Vein Segmentation of Ultrasound Images for Autonomous Venipuncture
Yu Chen, Yuxuan Wang, Bolin Lai, Zijie Chen, Xu Cao, Nanyang Ye, Zhongyuan Ren, Junbo Zhao, Xiao-Yun Zhou, Peng Qi.
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2021
[Paper]