Yuwei Wu

Yuwei Wu


I'm Yuwei, a final-year Ph.D. student in Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, advised by Prof. Vijay Kumar. Before my doctoral research, I worked with Prof. Fei Gao at Zhejiang Uiversity on trajectory optimization for quadrotors.

My work has published in IEEE RA-L, T-ITS, T-ASE, ICRA, IROS, MRS, WAFR and DARS, and has received recognition including selection as an IROS 2025 Best Paper Award Finalist, a Best Paper Award nomination at DARS 2024, and an Oral Highlight at the ICRA 2025 Doctoral Consortium. I also contribute to the robotics community as a Guest Editor for Autonomous Robots, student representative on the IEEE TC on Aerial Robotics and UAVs, and an organizer of workshops at RSS and IROS. I have reviewed more than 100 submissions across over 10 robotics journals and conferences.

A central question underlying my work is: How can we identify the right level of abstraction to reduce complexity while preserving the essential structure needed for robot motion planning and decision-making? Guided by this perspective, I develop physical, geometric, and semantic abstractions that provide a common foundation for integrating optimization, control, data-driven methods, and foundation models toward reliable embodied AI.

Recent News:
  • [Jun. 2026] Two papers were accepted to IROS 2026.
  • [Jun. 2026] Our workshop on Tightly Coupled Physical Interaction and Collaboration in Multi-Robot Systems was accepted to IROS 2026.
  • [Jun. 2026] Our WAFR paper was featured at GRASP News "Geometric optimization frameworks for safe, real-time trajectory generation"
  • [May. 2026] Our MIGHTY project was featured in several news, including Penn Today, DroneXL.co, MIT News, and GRASP Lab News
  • [May. 2026] Our RA-L paper titled "Towards Optimizing a Convex Cover of Collision-Free Space for Trajectory Generation" was presented at ICRA 2026.
  • [Apr. 2026] Our paper titled "STAR-Filter: Efficient Convex Free-Space Approximation via Starshaped Set Filtering in Noisy Environments" was accepted to WAFR 2026.
  • [Mar. 2026] I am honored to serve as a student representative on the IEEE Technical Committee on Aerial Robotics and UAVs for the 2026-2027 term.
  • [Mar. 2026] The work collabrated with Kota Kondo and Prof. Jonathan P How, titled "MIGHTY: Hermite Spline-based Efficient Trajectory Planning", was accepted to IEEE RA-L.
  • [Jan. 2026] Presented a poster at Robotics Gordon Research Conference: Embodied Intelligence in Robots and Animals.
  • [Nov. 2025] One paper was accepted to IEEE T-ASE.
  • [Oct. 2025] I was invited to chair the session “Intelligent and Safe Autonomy for Aerial Systems” under the Air Transportation Section (ATS) track. at the INFORMS 2025.
  • [Oct. 2025] Refered by TILOS to present a poster at the Summit for AI Institutes Leadership (SAIL) 2025
  • [Sep. 2025] Two papers (1, 2) were accepted to the IEEE MRS 2025.
  • [Sep. 2025] I gave a talk at RGSO - CARS Seminar, University of Delaware titled “Building Resilient and Efficient Robot Autonomy.”
  • [Jun. 2025] One paper was accepted to IEEE/RSJ IROS 2025 (Best Paper Award Finalist).
  • [Jun. 2025] I presented our work titled "Learning Riemannian Polynomials for 3-D Rigid Body Motions" at the TILOS 2025 Industry Day .
  • [Apr. 2025] My work has been selected for Oral Highlights at the IEEE ICRA 2025 Doctoral Consortium.
  • [Apr. 2025] I gave a talk on Flying Robot Swarms at Roxborough Library, "Fun With Robots" program.
  • [Mar. 2025] Our workshop Leveraging Implicit Methods for Aerial Autonomy was accepted to RSS 2025.
  • [Mar. 2025] I gave a talk at the ESE Ph.D. Colloquium titled “Real-Time Spatiotemporal Motion Planning for Autonomous Robots.”
  • [Mar. 2025] One paper was accepted to IEEE RA-L.
  • [Jan. 2025] Two papers were accepted to IEEE ICRA 2025.
  • [Nov. 2024] Presented a demo featured in PHL17 News covering our drone research.
  • [Jun. 2024] ROS and Open Robotics featured our open-source work in a post on X.
  • [Sep. 2024] Our RA-L paper was presented at IEEE ICRA@40.
  • [Sep. 2024] One paper was accepted to DARS and nomiated as DARS best paper award.
  • [Jul. 2024] I presented our work titled "Finding Trajectory-Optimal Convex Cover in a Cluttered Environment" at the TILOS 2024 Industry Day .
  • [Jun. 2024] One paper was accepted to IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024.
  • [Apr. 2024] I gave a talk on How robots find their way at Roxborough Library, "Fun With Robots" program.
  • [Jan. 2024] One paper was accepted to IEEE RA-L and one paper was accepted to IEEE ICRA 2024.
  • [Jun. 2023] I presented our work titled "Learning Time-Optimal Minimum Control Trajectory for Quadrotors" at the TILOS 2023 Industry Day .
  • [Jan. 2023] Passed my qualifying exam and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy.
  • [Jan. 2023] One paper was accepted to IEEE ICRA 2023.
  • [Sep. 2022] I presented our work at CBRIC 2022 Annual Meeting.
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Research Topics