Kaixiang Yao

I am a Robotics Engineering undergraduate at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), advised by Prof. Chenglong Fu. I am also a visiting undergraduate researcher at UC Berkeley, working with Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka and Prof. Koushil Sreenath, with mentorship from Yuxin Chen.

My research interests lie in robot learning and embodied AI, with a focus on general-purpose robotic manipulation. I am interested in developing robots that can perform a broad range of manipulation tasks and generalize across objects and environments.

Kaixiang Yao at the Golden Gate Bridge

Selected Publications

Overview of the physical assembly, asynchronous digital twin, and safety feedback loop

Quasi-real-time digital twin for robotic assembly: a physics-based multi-fidelity framework

Kaixiang Yao, Hao Chi, Dingye Chen, Jiwen Zhang

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2026 JCR Q1 · 5-year IF 9.2

A ROS 2-based digital twin that couples supervisory control with background finite-element analysis for flexible robotic assembly.

Paper

RopeFormer: Cross-Trial Adaptation from Interaction History for Dynamic Rope Manipulation

Menglin Wu*, Kaixiang Yao*, Shangbo Luan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Yuxin Chen * Equal contribution.

Under review; arXiv:2609.23432, 2026

A history-conditioned Transformer-XL policy that adapts dynamic rope manipulation across repeated trials and transfers to a Unitree H1-2 with previously unseen ropes.

Paper Project

Overview of gaze sensing, grasp recognition, and multichannel FES control

Gaze-driven perception-action control of multi-channel FES for efficient grasp restoration

Kaixiang Yao, Zeyang Yang, Jinxin Sun, Kong Hoi Cheng, Junyun Fu, Zhaokai Chen, Chengyu Lin, Chenglong Fu

IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, 2026 JCR Q2 · 5-year IF 4.3

A gaze-driven perception and multichannel FES system for efficient grasp restoration.

Paper

Research Experience

2026 - Present

University of California, Berkeley

Visiting Undergraduate Researcher, Mechanical Systems Control Laboratory

Dynamic rope manipulation and sim-to-real robot learning.

2025 - Jun. 2026

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Undergraduate Researcher

Robot learning for high-fidelity rigid-soft contact.

2024 - May 2026

Southern University of Science and Technology

Undergraduate Researcher

Assistive manipulation with gaze sensing and FES.

Summer 2025

Tsinghua University

Undergraduate Researcher

Digital twins for robotic assembly.

Service

Reviewer, CoRL 2026