About Me
My name is Xiaodi Yuan, and I also go by Ada. Chinese name. My name is 袁 (Yuan) 小迪 (Xiaodi) in Chinese. Xiaodi is pronounced like "see-Aw-dee", and Yuan is pronounced like "yoo-An". Why Ada? I chose this name because (a) I know Xiaodi is hard to pronounce (and it's okay); (b) Ada is lexicographically small; (c)
More about those names?
"ada" is a subsequence of "xiaodi yuan"; (d) actually, I named myself after world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace.
I am a first-year PhD student at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Hao Su. I received my B.Eng. degree from IIIS, Tsinghua University, where I worked with Prof. Li Yi on 3D shape reconstruction, and Prof. Tao Du on physics-based simulation.
My research interests are computer graphics and physics-based simulation. I am working on building fast and realistic simulation environments for embodied AI.
Fun Fact
I appeared on Google Maps Street View here!
Publications
General-Purpose Sim2Real Protocol for Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation With Marker-Based Visuotactile Sensors
TRO 2024 [PDF]
We build a general-purpose Sim2Real protocol for manipulation policy learning with marker-based visuotactile sensors. To improve the simulation fidelity, we employ an FEM-based physics simulator that can simulate the sensor deformation accurately and stably for arbitrary geometries. We further propose a novel tactile feature extraction network that directly processes the set of pixel coordinates of tactile sensor markers and a self-supervised pre-training strategy to improve the efficiency and generalizability of RL policies.
