William Yang

I am a robotics researcher working toward making our robots capable of reliably achieving highly dynamic motions. I am interested in the relevant factors when a robot makes high speed impacts with its environment and how to leverage that insight to develop better controllers. I've developed many controllers for the bipedal robot Cassie, particularly for highly dynamic motions such as running and jumping. Currently, I'm working on contact-rich dynamic manipulation.

I am a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania working at the DAIR lab, advised by Michael Posa and supported under the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.


More Bio Info     Github     G. Scholar     LinkedIn    

Dynamic On-Palm Manipulation via Controlled Sliding

William Yang, Michael Posa
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024
Outstanding Student Paper Award
Code  •   Arxiv  •   Website    

Impact-Invariant Control: Maximizing Control Authority During Impacts

William Yang, Michael Posa
Code  •   Arxiv  •   Website    

Validating Robotics Simulators on Real-World Impacts

Brian Acosta*, William Yang*, Michael Posa
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2022
Code  •   Arxiv  •   Dataset    

Impact Invariant Control with Applications to Bipedal Locomotion

William Yang, Michael Posa
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2021
Code  •   Arxiv    

Spine morphology and energetics: how principles from nature apply to robotics

Yevgeniy Yesilevskiy, William Yang, and C. David Remy
Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 2018
Paper    

2022

Impact-Invariant Running on the Cassie Bipedal Robot, Dynamic Walking 2022 - Madison, Wisconsin

2022

Impact-Invariant Running on the Cassie Bipedal Robot, ICRA 2022, Legged Robots Workshop - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2017

The Effect of Spine Morphology on the Motions and Energetics of Quadrupedal Robots, Dynamic Walking 2017 - Mariehamn, Finland

2023

Applied Scientist II intern - Amazon Robotics: Cambridge, Massachusetts

2019

NSF GRFP