Yifan Zhu
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Contact
Building & Room:
CDRLC 3432
Address:
850 W. Taylor St., Chicago, IL 60607
Office Phone:
Email:
CV Link:
Related Sites:
About
My research vision is to develop fundamental technologies that enable robots to understand their contacts with the external world from proactive interactions and perform meaningful tasks. My prior research lies at the intersection of physics modeling, optimization, machine learning, and hardware design. I aim to develop representations for robots that facilitate tight integration of physics modeling and machine learning for predictive world modeling from visual-tactile perceptions, especially in the low-data regime.
Selected Publications
Yifan Zhu, T. Xiang, A. Dollar, and Z. Pan, “One-Shot Real-to-Sim via End-to-End Differentiable Simulation and Rendering,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2025.
Yifan Zhu*, M. Hao*, X. Zhu*, Q. Bateux, A. Wong, and A. Dollar, “Forces for Free: Vision-Based Contact Force Estimation with a Compliant Hand,” Science Robotics, 2025.
J. M. Correia*, P. Naughton*, J.C. Peng*, Yifan Zhu*, J. S. Nam, Q. Kong, X. Zhang, A. Penmetcha, R. Ji, N. Fu, et al., “Immersive Commodity Telepresence with the Avatrina Robot Avatar,” International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), pp. 1–29, 2024.
Yifan Zhu*, P. Thangeda*, M. Ornik, and K. Hauser, “Few-shot Adaptation for Manipulating Granular Materials under Domain Shift,” in Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS), 2023.
Yifan Zhu, L. Abdulmajeid, and K. Hauser, “A Data-driven Approach for Fast Simulation of Robot Locomotion on Granular Media,” in International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019.
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science, UIUC, 2023
B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University, 2017