Photo

Lujie Yang

I am a final-year PhD student at MIT EECS advised by Prof. Russ Tedrake. I obtained my bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley, under the mentorship of Prof. Francesco Borrelli.

I am interested in the planning and control of robotic systems through the integration of machine learning, optimization, and control theory. I develop algorithms that combine data-driven and model-based optimization techniques to enable highly performant and robust robots, particularly in the context of dexterous, contact-rich manipulation.

I love playing badminton, visiting museums and writing classical Chinese poetry. Here is a selected collection of my poems.

I am seeking a research-oriented position in industry. If you think my expertise aligns with your needs, please feel free to reach out.

   /      /   lujie [at] mit (dot) edu



News


Selected Publications

(* indicates equal contribution)

Physics-Driven Data Generation for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Trajectory Optimization
Lujie Yang, H.J. Terry Suh*, Tong Zhao*, Bernhard Paus Græsdal, Tarik Kelestemur, Jiuguang Wang, Tao Pang, Russ Tedrake
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025
[Project] [Video] [Paper]

A New Semidefinite Relaxation for Linear and Pieceweise-Affine Optimal Control with Time Scaling
Lujie Yang, Tobia Marcucci, Pablo Parrilo, Russ Tedrake
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025
[Paper]

Lyapunov-stable Neural Control for State and Output Feedback: A Novel Formulation
Lujie Yang*, Hongkai Dai*, Zhouxing Shi, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Russ Tedrake, Huan Zhang
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024
[Paper] [Code] [MIT News]

Fighting Uncertainty with Gradients: Offline Reinforcement Learning via Diffusion Score Matching
H.J. Terry Suh, Glen Chou*, Hongkai Dai*, Lujie Yang*, Abhishek Gupta, Russ Tedrake
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2023
[Project] [Paper] [Code]

Approximate Optimal Controller Synthesis for Cart-Poles and Quadrotors via Sums-of-Squares
Lujie Yang, Hongkai Dai, Alexandre Amice, Russ Tedrake
Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 2023
MIT LIDS Student Conference 2023, Best Presentation Award
[Video] [Paper] [Code]

Global Planning for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Local Smoothing of Quasi-Dynamic Contact Models
Tao Pang*, H.J. Terry Suh*, Lujie Yang, Russ Tedrake
Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) 2023, King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award Honorable Mention
[Project] [Paper] [Code] [MIT News]

Discrete Approximate Information States in Partially Observable Environments
Lujie Yang, Kaiqing Zhang, Alexandre Amice, Yunzhu Li, Russ Tedrake
American Control Conference (ACC) 2022
[Paper]

Lyapunov-stable neural-network control
Hongkai Dai, Benoit Landry, Lujie Yang, Marco Pavone, Russ Tedrake
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2021
[Paper] [Code]



Selected Honors


Teaching



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