Dr. Yijiong Lin

:envelope: : yijiong {dot} lin {at} bristol {dot} ac {dot} uk

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I envision intelligent robots will reshape our planet.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol, UK. I am currently working on the ARIA-funded project ‘Democratising Co-Design of Hardware and Control for Robot Dexterity’ project in the Robot Dexterity program, led by Prof. Nathan Lepora and Prof. Edward Johns (Imeprial College London). My research focuses on developing multimodal sensing and sim-to-real deep reinforcement learning methods for dexterous robotic manipulation.

I recieved my Ph.D. degree in Engineering Mathematics in 2025 from the University of Bristol, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Nathan Lepora, Dr. Efi Psomopoulou, and Dr. Dandan Zhang. My doctoral research is ‘Sim-to-Real Deep Tactile Policies for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation’.

In my free time, you can catch me playing badminton, swimming, or exploring urban and natural views with my lovely camera (some selections). I’m also a cat person. :smile_cat:

News

(For more up-to-date information, please check my Google Scholar)
Apr, 2026 Our paper NeuralTouch: Neural Descriptors for Precise Sim-to-Real Tactile Robot Control has been accepted for publication in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics. :tada:
Feb, 2026 I am serving as a co-organizer for the ICRA 2026 ViTac Workshop: Learning to See and Feel: Vision-Tactile Synergy for Embodied AI.
Oct, 2025 Our NeuralTouch paper was selected as a Best Paper Award Finalist at the IROS 2025 Workshop on Tactile Sensing Towards Robot Dexterity and Intelligence. :tada:
Aug, 2025 Two papers have been accepted at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025. :tada:
Apr, 2025 I passed my PhD viva (defense)! I am grateful to my supervisors, Prof. Nathan Lepora, Prof. Efi Psomopoulou and Prof. Dandan Zhang, for their guidance and support throughout my doctoral journey. I also appreciate the support from the Viva Chair Prof. Jonathan Rossiter and the valuable feedback from my examiners, Prof. Shan Luo and Prof. Hongbin Liu. :tada:
Jan, 2025 I presented our peer-reviewed work on NeuralTouch at the 6th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop, held at King’s College London (KCL), UK, from January 7 to 8, 2025.
Dec, 2024 Our paper “Coarse-to-Fine Robotic Pushing Using Touch, Vision and Proprioception” has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). :tada:
Dec, 2024 I am excited to continue my research in the field of robotics as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bristol, Bristol Robotics Lab, UK.
Nov, 2024 Our paper “Snap-it, Tap-it, Splat-it: Tactile-Informed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Reconstructing Challenging Surfaces” has been accepted at the 12th International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2025. :tada:
Sep, 2024 Our paper “Anyrotate: Gravity-invariant in-hand object rotation with sim-to-real touch” is accepted at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2024. :tada:
Jun, 2024 I visited the LASR lab at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany from June 10 to 12, 2024, where I presented all research work conducted during my doctoral period and engage in academic discussions with Professor Roberto Calandra and his students.
May, 2024 I attended the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Yokohama, Japan, where I presented our work on Bi-Touch.
Apr, 2024 Our paper “Touchsdf: A deepsdf approach for 3d shape reconstruction using vision-based tactile sensing” has been accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). :tada:
Jan, 2024 Our work on Tactile Saliency got nominated as the Best Workshop Poster at the 5th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop. :tada:
Dec, 2023 Our work Bi-Touch received the Best Workshop Poster at the NeurIPS 1st Touch Processing Workshop. :tada:
Oct, 2023 We are presentinig our work Tactile Saliency at IROS 2023 in Detroit, U.S.!
Oct, 2023 We are pleased to announce that the code for our Bi-Touch paper has been open-sourced! :tada:
Jul, 2023 Our poster about Attention of Robot Touch was presented at the International Robotics Showcase 2023 in Bristol, UK.
Jul, 2023 Our work on Bi-Touch: Bimanual Tactile Manipulation with Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning got accepted by RA Letter. Checkout our website! :tada:
Jun, 2023 Our work on Sim-to-Real Model-Based and Model-Free Deep Reinforcement Learning for Tactile Pushing got accepted by RA Letter. :tada:
Jun, 2023 Our work on Tactile Saliency Prediction for Robust Sim-to-Real Tactile Control got accepted by IROS 2023. :tada: (Website)
Jun, 2023 I presented our poster at the ICRA 2023 ViTac Workshop in London, UK.
Apr, 2023 Our poster on Attention of Robotic Touch was accepted after single-blind review at the ICRA 2023 ViTac Workshop: Blending Virtual and Real Visuo-Tactile Perception.
Jan, 2023 Our poster of bimanual tactile robotic system got nominated as the best posters award at the 4th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop.
Oct, 2022 I presented our paper in IROS 2022 in Kyoto, Japan.
Sep, 2022 Our paper got nominated as the best student paper award at the 27th IEEE International Conference on Automation and Computing (ICAC2022). :tada:
Aug, 2022 We released the code for our Tactile Gym 2.0 paper (RAL/IROS 2022).
Jul, 2022 We have two papers got accepted by RAL/IROS 2022. :tada:
Jun, 2022 I presented a poster on Tactile Gym 2.0 in the 1st Bristol RL Symposium, Bristol, UK.
Nov, 2021 We presented our work on “Dexterous Robot Control Using Deep Learning and Biomimetic Touch” at the 5th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in London, UK.
May, 2021 Our paper got accepted by RSS 2021. :tada:
Dec, 2020 I started my dotoral programme in Robot Learning at the University of Bristol supervised by Prof. Nathan Lepora in Bristol, UK. :fire:
Dec, 2019 Our paper got accepted by RAL/IROS 2020. :tada:
Dec, 2019 I presented our work in the 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop on Robot Learning in Vancouver, Canada.
Aug, 2019 We gave a tutorial on “Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning” in 2019 IEEE International Conference on Real-time Computing and Robotics (RCAR), Irkutsk, Russia
Jul, 2019 I had a 2-week visit to the University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute where I performed research collaboration with Prof. Paul Weng and Dr. Matthieu Zimmer in Deep Reinforcement Learning, Shanghai, China,
Dec, 2018 I presented our paper in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Papers

  1. ViTacGen: Robotic Pushing with Vision-to-Touch Generation
    Zhiyuan Wu, Yijiong Lin, Yongqiang Zhao, Xuyang Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Nathan F. Lepora, and Shan Luo
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025
    Paper Code Website
  2. Tactile SoftHand-A: 3D-Printed, Tactile, Highly-Underactuated, Anthropomorphic Robot Hand with an Antagonistic Tendon Mechanism
    Haoran Li, Christopher J. Ford, Chenghua Lu, Yijiong Lin, Matteo Bianchi, Manuel G. Catalano, Efi Psomopoulou, and Nathan F. Lepora
    The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2025
    Paper
  3. Classification of Vision-Based Tactile Sensors: A Review
    Haoran Li, Yijiong Lin, Chenghua Lu, Max Yang, Efi Psomopoulou, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE Sensors Journal, 2025
    Paper
  4. NeuralTouch: Neural Descriptors for Precise Sim-to-Real Tactile Robot Control
    Yijiong Lin, Bowen Deng, Chenghua Lu, Max Yang, Efi Psomopoulou, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2026
    Accepted
  5. SimShear: Sim-to-Real Shear-based Tactile Servoing
    Kipp* Freud, Yijiong* Lin, and Nathan F. Lepora
    9th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025
  6. Text2Touch: Tactile In-Hand Manipulation with LLM-Designed Reward Functions
    Harrison Field, Max Yang, Yijiong Lin, Efi Psomopoulou, David A.W. Barton, and Nathan F. Lepora
    9th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025
  7. Snap-it, tap-it, splat-it: Tactile-informed 3d gaussian splatting for reconstructing challenging surfaces
    Mauro Comi, Alessio Tonioni, Max Yang, Jonathan Tremblay, Valts Blukis, Yijiong Lin, Nathan F. Lepora, and Laurence Aitchison
    International Conference on 3D Vision, 2025
  8. Anyrotate: Gravity-invariant in-hand object rotation with sim-to-real touch
    Max Yang, Chenghua Lu, Alex Church, Yijiong Lin, Chris Ford, Haoran Li, Efi Psomopoulou, David A.W. Barton, and Nathan F. Lepora
    8th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024
  9. Touchsdf: A deepsdf approach for 3d shape reconstruction using vision-based tactile sensing
    Mauro Comi, Yijiong Lin, Alex Church, Alessio Tonioni, Laurence Aitchison, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2024
  10. RAL
    Coarse-to-fine Robotic Pushing using Touch, Vision and Proprioception
    Bowen Deng, Yijiong Lin, Max Yang, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025
    Paper
  11. Sim-to-real model-based and model-free deep reinforcement learning for tactile pushing
    Max Yang, Yijiong Lin, Alex Church, John Lloyd, Dandan Zhang, David A.W. Barton, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023
  12. Bi-Touch: Bimanual Tactile Manipulation With Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Yijiong Lin, Alex Church, Max Yang, Haoran Li, John Lloyd, Dandan Zhang, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023
    Paper Code Website Press
  13. Attention for Robot Touch: Tactile Saliency Prediction for Robust Sim-to-Real Tactile Control
    Yijiong Lin, Mauro Comi, Alex Church, Dandan Zhang, and Nathan F Lepora
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
    Paper Website
  14. Tactile Gym 2.0: Sim-to-real Deep Reinforcement Learning for Comparing Low-cost High-Resolution Robot Touch
    Yijiong Lin, John Lloyd, Alex Church, and Nathan F. Lepora
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Aug 2022
    Paper Code Website
  15. DigiTac: A DIGIT-TacTip Hybrid Tactile Sensor for Comparing Low-Cost High-Resolution Robot Touch
    Nathan F. Lepora, Yijiong Lin, Ben Money-Coomes, and John Lloyd
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Aug 2022
    Paper Code Website
  16. Probabilistic Discriminative Models address the Tactile Perceptual Aliasing Problem
    John Lloyd, Yijiong Lin, and Nathan F. Lepora
    In Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), Jul 2021
    Paper
  17. Invariant Transform Experience Replay: Data Augmentation for Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Yijiong Lin, Jiancong Huang, Matthieu Zimmer, Yisheng Guan, Juan Rojas, and Paul Weng
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Jul 2020
    Paper Code Website