About

Mukai Yu is a Ph.D. student in Robotics at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University since 2026. Previously, he earned his M.S. in Robotics from the same institute, where he was co-advised by Professor Sebastian Scherer and Professor László A. Jeni. He earned his B.S. in Integrative Systems and Design and Computer Science (double major) from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2024. Before his graduate studies, he worked as a research assistant on the WildFire Project from January to August 2023 and the 360 Camera Project from July to August 2022. He has participated in various robotics competitions including WRO, RCJ, FLL, FRC(6179 Photon Box), and RoboMaster since elementary school.

His work includes the Unified Spherical Frontend, a lens-neutral perception method for pinhole, fisheye, and 360-degree panoramic cameras. He also collaborates with Starlife Technologies (co-founded by AirLab alumnus Satrajit Chatterjee) to provide an immersive operator experience.

He loves movies, video games, basketball, and travel in his free time.

Research Interests

• Robotic Perception: Spherical Vision, 3D/4D Vision, Differentiable Rendering
• Robotic Control: Flow Matching Policy, Object Manipulation, Skill Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning
• Multimodal Learning and Large Models for Robotics

Contact

Website: tomnotch.com

Email: mukaiy@andrew.cmu.edu

Mobile Phone: +1 (217) 954-3972

LinkedIn: tomnotch

Github: Tom-Notch