Yifei Simon Shao (邵逸飞)

🐭🐭🐭 From Hangzhou, China

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GRASP Lab

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, PA

Generalist robots will be around humans before they can be fully autonomous! I want human and robots to collaborate in a way that is efficient, safe, and scalable.

I am a 4th year PhD student at UPenn’s GRASP Lab, developing generalizable, provable and VLM-driven robot systems for long-horizon, real-world physical human robot collaboration. I excel at bringing theory to hardware in quadrotors, mobile manipulators, quadrupeds, and autonomous vehicles. First-author papers in T-RO, RSS, RA-L, and ICRA.

I run a red note account that interviews robotics researchers and shoot live demos of their work. If you’d like more people to see your work, please email me! RedNote.

I am co-advised by Prof. Vijay Kumar and Prof. Pratik Chaudhari. I also work very closely with Prof. Nadia Figueroa.

See my Google Scholar for a complete list of publications.

Click on videos to zoom in!

selected publications

  1. CoRL Workshop
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    Symskill: Symbol and Skill Co-Invention for Data-Efficient and Real-Time Long-Horizon Manipulation
    Yifei Simon Shao, Yuchen Zheng, Sunan Sun, and 3 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.01661, 2025
    Best Paper Award (5%) HTML Poster
  2. CoRL Workshop
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    Maestro: Orchestrating Robotics Modules with Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot Generalist Robots
    Junyao Shi, Rujia Yang, Kaitian Chao, and 9 more authors
    2025
    Oral Presentation (20%) HTML Poster
  3. RSS
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    Don’t Yell at Your Robot! Constraint-Aware Intent Estimation for Dynamic Human-Robot Object Co-Manipulation
    Yifei Simon Shao, Tianyu Li, Shafagh Keyvanian, and 3 more authors
    Robotics: Science and Systems, 2024
    HTML
  4. T-RO
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    Refine: Reachability-based trajectory design using robust feedback linearization and zonotopes
    Jinsun Liu, Yifei Simon Shao, Lucas Lymburner, and 7 more authors
    IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2024
    HTML
  5. ICRA
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    Design and evaluation of motion planners for quadrotors in environments with varying complexities
    Yifei Simon Shao, Yuwei Wu, Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, and 2 more authors
    In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024
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  6. RA-L
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    Reachability-based trajectory safeguard (rts): A safe and fast reinforcement learning safety layer for continuous control
    Yifei Simon Shao, Chao Chen, Shreyas Kousik, and 1 more author
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021
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news

Oct 01, 2025 I will be co-organizing a workshop at my hometown Hangzhou IROS 2025: RoboGen: 3D World Generation for Robot Learning and Autonomous Systems.
Sep 27, 2025 Won Best Paper Award (5%) at CoRL Learning Effective Abstraction for Planning Workshop 2025 for SymSkill: Low-Data Symbol and Skill Learning
Sep 27, 2025 Oral Presentation (20%) at CoRL RoboArena Workshop 2025 for Maestro: VLM-Based Modular Generalist Robot. Contact me if you want to bring Maestro to your own quadrupedal mobile manipulator!
Jun 30, 2025 Paper on fast collision detection using GMM for manipulators accepted to IROS 2025
Sep 01, 2024 Started Research Scientist Internship at Amazon Lab126 working on next-generation robotics!
Jul 19, 2024 Paper Constraint-Aware Intent Estimation for Dynamic Human-Robot Object Co-Manipulation accepted to RSS 2024 and Don’t Yell at Your Robot! accepted to RSS GenAI-HRI Workshop 2024
Apr 29, 2024 Paper on Two Stage Motion Planning accepted to ICRA 2024, making it possible for the first time to choose the best planner for your environment.
Feb 16, 2024 Paper on Safe Motion Planning with Zonotopes accepted to T-RO 2024, making safe motion planning possible even with tracking errors!
Sep 01, 2022 Started PhD at GRASP UPenn coadvised by Prof. Vijay Kumar and Prof. Pratik Chaudhari
Mar 04, 2021 Paper on reachability-based safe planning accepted to RA-L 2021