About
I am the co-founder and CTO at Sancho, where we are building robots to help define the next generation of manufacturing. Stay tuned for more!
Previously, I was a Tech Lead at Nuro, where I worked on mapping and localization for autonomous vehicles. I am interested in machine learning, state estimation, and writing good software for robotics. Check out our latest work on using widely available aerial data for ML-based localization of autonomous vehicles, presented at ICRA 2025.
I was a Founding Perception Engineer at Phiar, a startup focused on combining augmented reality, road understanding, and in-car navigation. Phiar was acquired by Google in 2022.
I earned a master’s degree in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019. I worked with Prof. Michael Kaess in the Robot Perception Lab.
Publications
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Evaluating Global Geo-alignment for Precision Learned Autonomous Vehicle Localization using Aerial Data Yi Yang, Xuran Zhao, H. Charles Zhao, Shumin Yuan, Samuel M. Bateman, Tiffany A. Huang, Chris Beall, Will Maddern International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2025 [PDF] |
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Surfel-Based Dense RGB-D Reconstruction with Global and Local Consistency Yi Yang, Wei Dong, Michael Kaess International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2019 [PDF] |
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GPU Accelerated Robust Scene Reconstruction Wei Dong, Jaesik Park, Yi Yang, Michael Kaess International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2019 [PDF] |
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A Robust and Efficient Algorithm for the PnL Problem Using Algebraic Distance to Approximate the Reprojection Distance Lipu Zhou, Yi Yang, Montiel Abello, Michael Kaess AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019 [PDF] |
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Surfel-based RGB-D Reconstruction and SLAM with Global and Local Consistency Yi Yang Master Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU-RI-TR-19-45, 2019 [PDF] |