Portrait of Yiting Chen

Yiting Chen 陈一霆

I am a Computer Science Ph.D. student at Rice University, advised by Prof. Kaiyu Hang in the Robotics and Physical Interactions Lab (RobotΠ Lab).

I work on scaling robotic dexterity via structurephysics, geometry, and heuristics, baked in as inductive bias, datasimulation, web video, and the mix that scales, learningreinforcement learning and world models, evaluationsim for the sanity check; the real world decides.

Previously, I obtained a B.Eng. from Wuhan University with Prof. Miao Li and an M.Sc. from Chalmers with Prof. Yasemin Bekiroglu. I also spent time at Amazon IRG and EPFL LASA.

Under review Humanoid Forceful Manipulation Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of humanoid tactile policies
Under review Learning from Human Videos Turning human demonstration videos into robot dexterity
ManipulationNet Spotlight: Test Your Robot’s Skills in NIST’s Global Online Competition

News

Publications

See also my Google Scholar.

  1. RoboTok: An Internet-Scale Data Engine for Human Demonstration Retrieval and Dexterous Manipulation Learning

    Howard Qian, Yiting Chen, Yunfei Xie, Kejia Ren, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Gaotian Wang, Bowen Wen, Chen Wei, Kaiyu Hang

    arXiv 2026

    papercodeproject page

  2. EgoInfinity: A Web-Scale 4D Hand-Object Interaction Data Engine for Any-View Robot Retargeting and Video-to-Action Robot Learning

    Gaotian Wang, Kejia Ren, Andrew Morgan, Yiting Chen, Howard H. Qian, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Kaiyu Hang

    arXiv 2026

    papercodeproject page

  3. ManipulationNet: An Infrastructure for Benchmarking Real-World Robot Manipulation with Physical Skill Challenges and Embodied Multimodal Reasoning

    Yiting Chen, Kenneth Kimble, Edward H. Adelson, Tamim Asfour, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Sachin Chitta, Yash Chitambar, Ziyang Chen, Ken Goldberg, Danica Kragic, Hui Li, Xiang Li, Yunzhu Li, Aaron Prather, Nancy Pollard, Maximo A. Roa-Garzon, Robert Seney, Shuo Sha, Shihefeng Wang, Yu Xiang, Kaifeng Zhang, Yuke Zhu, Kaiyu Hang

    Under review at Science Robotics

    papercodeproject pageFeatured in a NIST Spotlight

  4. B4P: Simultaneous Grasp and Motion Planning for Object Placement via Parallelized Bidirectional Forests and Path Repair

    Benjamin H. Leebron, Kejia Ren, Yiting Chen, Kaiyu Hang

    IROS 2025 · Hangzhou, China

    paper

  5. ARC-Calib: Autonomous Markerless Camera-to-Robot Calibration via Exploratory Robot Motions

    Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Yiting Chen, Joshua T. Grace, Aaron M. Dollar, Kaiyu Hang

    IROS 2025 · Hangzhou, China

    paper

  6. rt-RISeg: Real-Time Model-Free Robot Interactive Segmentation for Active Instance-Level Object Understanding

    Howard H. Qian, Yiting Chen, Gaotian Wang, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Kaiyu Hang

    IROS 2025 · Hangzhou, China

    paper

  7. Robust Peg-in-Hole Assembly under Uncertainties via Compliant and Interactive Contact-Rich Manipulation

    Yiting Chen, Kenneth Kimble, Howard H. Qian, Podshara Chanrungmaneekul, Robert Seney, Kaiyu Hang

    RSS 2025 · Los Angeles, USA

    paper

  8. Implicit Articulated Robot Morphology Modeling with Configuration Space Neural Signed Distance Functions

    Yiting Chen, Xiao Gao, Kunpeng Yao, Loïc Niederhauser, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Aude Billard

    ICRA 2025 · Atlanta, USA

    papercode

  9. Sliding Touch-Based Exploration for Modeling Unknown Object Shape with Multi-Fingered Hands

    Yiting Chen, Ahmet Ercan Tekden, Marc Peter Deisenroth, Yasemin Bekiroglu

    IROS 2023 · Detroit, USA

    paperposter

  10. Deep Grasp Adaptation through Domain Transfer

    Yiting Chen, Junnan Jiang, Ruiqi Lei, Yasemin Bekiroglu, Fei Chen, Miao Li

    ICRA 2023 · London, UK

    paperposter

  11. Robot Cooking With Stir-Fry: Bimanual Non-Prehensile Manipulation of Semi-Fluid Objects

    Junjia Liu, Yiting Chen, Zhipeng Dong, Shixiong Wang, Sylvain Calinon, Miao Li, Fei Chen

    RA-L 2022 · 7(2): 5159–5166

    papercodeCovered by TechXplore

  12. Learning Robotic Ultrasound Scanning Skills via Human Demonstrations and Guided Explorations

    Xutian Deng, Yiting Chen, Fei Chen, Miao Li

    ROBIO 2021 · Sanya, China

    paperT.J. Tarn Best Paper in Robotics Award, Finalist

Experience

Selected Honors & Awards

Service

I serve as the Technical Chair of ManipulationNet.

I serve as a reviewer for: IJRR, TOG, RA-L, SIGGRAPH Asia, CoRL, T-Mech, ICRA, IROS, CASE, UR.

I served as a TA for COMP 462/562: Introduction to Modern Robotics (Spring 2025, Spring 2026) and COMP 341: Practical Machine Learning (Fall 2025).