Yifan Hou

I am a Postdoctoral researcher at the REALab, Stanford University, working with Prof. Shuran Song. Prior to joining Stanford, I was an Applied Scientist on the Vulcan team at Amazon Robotics. I obtained my PhD and MS degrees from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Matthew T. Mason. I obtained BoE from the department of Automation at Tsinghua University. I had also spent time at Toyota Research Institute and MIT.

My career goal is to achieve human level manipulation dexterity on robots. During my PhD, I designed methods to execute contact-rich manipulation robustly against modeling uncertainties and disturbance forces using active compliance control schemes. I then spent three years at Amazon Robotics pushing compliant manipulation from research to industrial products in the Stow project. I believe that robotic manipulation has an opportunity of wide adoption in people’s daily life, where the bottleneck is the ability to scale up the aquisition of robust, general manipulation skills. Currently my research interests include the intersection of data-driven visual motor policies and robust model-based control as well as dexterous manipulation.