Justin Yu

Justin Yu

PhD Student · AI & Robotics · UC Berkeley



About

I am a fourth-year PhD student in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) group, specializing in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. My research interests include robot learning for manipulation, real-to-sim-to-real, and reward function learning. Broadly, I focus on developing systems and algorithms that enable real-world robots to learn and improve on practical manipulation tasks.

I am advised by Ken Goldberg in the AUTOLab and am supported by the NSF GRFP. I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2023.

Interactive 3D Scenes — click & drag to orbit
 Click & drag to explore
Egocentric Manipulation Interface Real-world · autonomous
 Click & drag to explore
Real2Render2Real Synthetic · rendered data
 Click & drag to explore
WARP-RM Real-world · autonomous
 Click & drag to explore
WARP-RM Real-world · autonomous
Education
2020 - 2023
2016 - 2020
Experience
Jun 2025 -
AI & Robotics Research Intern
Aug 2020 - May 2023
Jun 2018 - Jun 2020
Head of Mechanical Build & Design

Research Publications
2026 arXiv Preprint

SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation

Qianzhong Chen, Hau Zheng, Justin Yu, Suning Huang, Jiankai Sun, Ken Goldberg, Chuan Wen, Pieter Abbeel, Yide Shentu, Philipp Wu, Mac Schwager

CoRL 2026 · Austin

GaP: A Graph-as-Policy Multi-Agent Self-Learning Harness for Variational Automation Tasks

Kaiyuan Chen*, Shuangyu Xie*, Letian Fu, Justin Yu, William Pacini, Sandeep Bajamahal, Hudson Kim, Jaimyn Drake, Daehwa Kim, Haoru Xue, Jonathan Francis, Christian Juette, Peter Schaldenbrand, Muhammet Yunus Seker, Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Uksang Yoo, Guanzhi Wang, Adithyavairavan Murali, Balakumar Sundaralingam, S. Shankar Sastry, Spencer Huang, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Ken Goldberg

CoRL 2026 · Austin

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

Junyi Zhang*, Jiaxin Ge*, Hanjun Yoo, Letian Fu, Zihan Yang, Yaowei Liu, Raj Saravanan, Shaofeng Yin, Justin Yu, Dantong Niu, Zirui Wang, Roei Herzig, Ken Goldberg, Yutong Bai, David M. Chan, Ion Stoica, Angjoo Kanazawa, Jiahui Lei, Haiwen Feng, Trevor Darrell

CoRL 2021 · London

Legged Robot State Estimation using Invariant Kalman Filtering and Learned Contact Events

Tzu-Yuan Lin, Ray Zhang, Justin Yu, Maani Ghaffari


Projects

Low Cost I2RT YAM Robot Teaching Devices

Weekend project - Open source hardware and software for I2RT YAM leader arms.

Realtime Robots Control Package

Open source software package to control real-world robot arms including the I2RT YAMs, Franka Panda.

YuMi IRB14000 Bimanual Robot Realtime Control Package

Open source software package to control the ABB YuMi IRB14000 bimanual robot through control interfaces including: interactive websocket GUI, Meta Quest VR Controllers, and autonomous policy models.

3D-Printed Quadrupedal Robot

3D-Printed Quadrupedal Robot

Personal project to design, build, and code a quadrupedal robot from scratch.

3D-Printed 6DoF Robot Arm

Personal project to design, build, and code a 6DoF robot arm from scratch.

2023 Michigan Mars Rover - Dahlia

2023 Michigan Mars Rover - Dahlia

Affiliation: Team Lead - RF Wireless Communications for University of Michigan Mars Rover team
Dahlia received a System Acceptance Review score of 92.21/100.

2022 Michigan Mars Rover - Rosie

2022 Michigan Mars Rover - Rosie

Affiliation: Team Lead - RF Wireless Communications for University of Michigan Mars Rover team
Rosie received a System Acceptance Review score of 90.97/100 and finished 1st place at the URC and CIRC competitions.

2021 Michigan Mars Rover - Blue

2021 Michigan Mars Rover - Blue

Affiliation: Robotic Arm Hardware Designer for University of Michigan Mars Rover team
Though in-person competition was cancelled due to the pandemic, Blue received a System Acceptance Review score of 93.09/100.

2020 FRC Robot - Cheems

2020 FRC Robot - Cheems

Affiliation: Team Lead - Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Season cut short due to the pandemic.

2019 FRC Robot - Gromit

2019 FRC Robot - Gromit

Affiliation: Team Lead - Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Ranked 1st seed at Monterey Bay Regional - Alliance Captain at the FRC World Championship in Houston.

2018 FRC Robot - Guido

2018 FRC Robot - Guido

Affiliation: Member of Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Joined the first seeded team in World Championship - eliminated in finals matches.

2017 FRC Robot - Ferb

2017 FRC Robot - Ferb

Affiliation: Member of Mechanical Design and Fabrication for 3128 Aluminum Narwhals.
Finalist Alliance Captain at San Diego Regional - Advanced to FRC World Championship in Houston.