Sha Yi
University of California, San Diego
shayi@ucsd.edu
Bio
Sha Yi is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California San Diego, co-advised by Professors Xiaolong Wang and Michael T. Tolley. She received her Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was advised by Professors Katia Sycara and Zeynep Temel. Her research interests include using computational methods to design and control novel robotic systems. She is a recipient of CMU Presidential Fellowship and has industry experience with Amazon Robotics, Microsoft, and early-stage startups.
Areas of Research
- Robotics
Control-Hardware Co-Design of Robotic Systems
Robotic systems are already influencing industrial automation and everyday life, yet their development remains largely an iterative process: hardware is first designed manually, then control algorithms are applied on top of the robot hardware. Hardware choices may limit control capabilities, and the overall performance improvements need repeated hardware revisions. This labor-intensive process is also commonly guided by engineers’ intuition rather than integrated computational metrics. I aim to overcome these barriers with a unified, data-driven co-design process. Such a joint framework not only automates hardware design generation and provides quantitative evaluation of candidate designs, but also develops customized designs for downstream use cases. Furthermore, this computational approach can potentially uncover novel robot morphologies and control policies beyond human intuition, enabling capabilities previously thought to be infeasible.