Zhutian (Skye) Yang

ztyang {at} mit {dot} edu

Hello! My name is Skye and I'm a PhD candidate at MIT working on robot learning and robot planning for long-horizon mobile manipulation problems. I'm co-advised by Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez in the Learning and Intelligent Systems group. I'm currently a part-time research intern at NVIDIA Seattle Robotics Lab, working with Dieter Fox. I obtained bachelor's degree in information engineering and media at NTU, Singapore.

Research

plan quickly and execute robustly

semantically rich, geometrically complex environments

Compose diffusion policies and RL-trained policies for multi-step mobile rearrangement problems.

Plan with information provided by pre-trained vision-language models.

Learn to plan for motion while satisfacing geometric collision-free, physical stability, and data-defined spatial constraints (e.g. packing non-convex objects in boxes).

Learn to predict task plan feasibility from images of worlds with articulated and movable obstacles.

Hierarchical planning and replanning in partially observable Task and Motion Planning problems.

Publications

Compositional Diffusion-Based Continuous Constraint Solvers

Zhutian Yang, Jiayuan Mao, Yilun Du, Jiajun Wu, Joshua Brett Tenenbaum, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, and Leslie Pack Kaelbling

CoRL 2023

Paper / Project Page / Github / Bibtex / Talk / MIT News / Poster (click to show) Poster (click to hide)

Sequence-Based Plan Feasibility Prediction for Efficient Task and Motion Planning

Zhutian Yang, Caelan Reed Garrett, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, and Dieter Fox

RSS 2023

🔥 We also won Best Paper Runner-Up in CoRL 2022 Workshop on Learning, Perception, and Abstraction for Long-Horizon Planning

Paper / Project Page / Github / Bibtex / Talk / MIT News / Tech Crunch / Poster (click to show)

Let’s Handle It: Generalizable Manipulation of Articulated Objects

Zhutian Yang, and Aidan Curtis

ICRL 2022 Workshop on Generalizable Policy Learning in the Physical World

🔥 We won 2nd place in the ManiSkill Challenge 2022 Robotics Track

Paper / Poster (click to show)

Flexibly Instructable Robots

Zhutian Yang, Patrick Henry Winston, and David Hsu

Undergraduate thesis work; Also appeared in Advances in Cognitive Systems 2019 and DSpace@MIT

Paper / Video Demo / Poster (click to show) Poster (click to hide)

Services

Reviewed for ICLR, IROS, RA-L, AAAI, and ICRA.

Co-organizing ICRA 2024 Workshop on Vision-Language Models for Navigation and Manipulation (VLMNM).

Co-organized RSS 2023 Workshop on Learning for Task and Motion Planning (LTAMP).

Serving as a student counselor in EECS Resources for Easing Friction and Stress since Summer 2020 and helped more than 10 graduate students through stressful situations such as changing advisors and family conflicts.

Served as Teaching Assistant to MIT 6.036 Introduction to Machine Learning in Spring 2022.