Ji Yin

— Anything is impossible until it is done.

I am a senior robotics engineer at Symbotic. I received my Ph.D. in Robotics at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2025, and M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University in the city of New York in 2020, and M.Sc. in Vehicle Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2018. I received my B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2017. The goal of my research is to develop safe and intelligent robots. My research interests lie at formal methods for safety, reinforcement learning, control theories, and robotics.

I was a member of DCSL lab of Georgia Tech led by Prof. Panagiotis Tsiotras from 2020 to 2025. During the last two years of my PhD study, I visited and stayed at REALM lab of MIT led by Prof. Chuchu Fan from 2023 to 2025. My Ph.D. thesis is titled Safe and Efficient Variational Inference Model Predictive Control with Application to Aggressive Autonomous Driving. I have been working on safe and efficient variational inference model predictive control (VI-MPC) for aggressive autonomous driving, which uses various approaches, including reinforcement learning, formal methods, control and optimization to ensure safety while achieving high performance in complex driving scenarios.

Besides research, I enjoy traveling, hiking, racing, snowboarding, surfing, and pingpong. I have a very cute border collie named Jirachi.

News

• Mar, 2025 Our paper Safe Beyond the Horizon: Efficient Sampling-based MPC with Neural Control Barrier Functions is accepted by RSS 2025!
• Mar, 2024 Our paper Chance-Constrained Information-Theoretic Stochastic Model Predictive Control with Safety Shielding is accepted by CDC 2024!
• Aug, 2023 Our paper Shield model predictive path integral: A computationally efficient robust mpc method using control barrier functions work is accepted by Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)!
• Dec, 2022 Our paper Risk-aware model predictive path integral control using conditional value-at-risk is accepted by ICRA 2023!
• May, 2022 Our paper Trajectory distribution control for model predictive path integral control using covariance steering is listed as the Outstanding Planning Paper Finalist by ICRA 2022!