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 currently looking for a PostDoc or Fellowship position, starting around 2024 Winter/2025 Spring.

I am a Ph.D. student working with Prof. Nathan Lepora and Dr. Dandan Zhang at the University of Bristol, UK. My research mainly focuses on the intersection of Robotics and Machine Learning. Specifically, my current research interests lie in these topics: Robotic Manipulation, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Tactile Sensing, Physics Simulation, and Sim-to-Real.

I obtained my master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Automation at the Guangdong University of Technology in 2017, supervised by Prof. Yisheng Guan and Dr. Juan Rojas. During my master’s period, I worked with Prof. Paul Weng at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute as a visiting student and later conducted a one-year research project on Reinforcement Learning. I did my Master’s thesis on Highly-efficient Robot Learning with Deep Reinforcement Learning.

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

News

(scroll down to check)
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.

Selected Publications

  1. RAL
    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
    PDF Code Website
  2. IROS
    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
    PDF Website
  3. RAL/IROS
    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
    PDF Code Website
  4. RAL/IROS
    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
    PDF Code Website
  5. RSS
    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
    PDF
  6. RAL/IROS
    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
    PDF Code Website