Yihao Lu

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About

Yihao Lu is a robotics researcher whose work bridges the critical gap between rigid and soft robotic systems, with a primary focus on robot kinematics, modeling, and control. His most impactful contribution is a novel inverse kinematics method for 6-DOF robots with non-spherical wrists (2020, 38 citations), which addresses a long-standing challenge in industrial robotics by enabling precise motion planning for non-standard manipulator geometries. This work has become a key reference for researchers working on robots with unconventional joint configurations. Lu has also made notable contributions to the emerging field of soft robotics, particularly through his work on continuum robots. His 2018 paper on shape modeling of a parallel soft panel continuum robot (4 citations) introduced an innovative approach to modeling the complex, highly deformable structures of soft robots—a notoriously difficult problem due to their infinite degrees of freedom. By developing a method to predict the shape of soft panel-based robots, Lu has helped lay the groundwork for more controllable and predictable soft robotic systems, which hold promise for applications in minimally invasive surgery, search and rescue, and human-robot interaction.