I’m a research associate (postdoc) in the School of Engineering at Cardiff University. I’m excited about enabling robots to manipulate real-world objects, rigid or deformable, through learning or non-learning methods. I studied deep (hierarchical) reinforcement learning and affordance learning for rigid object grasping and manipulation as a PhD student at Cardiff University and received the degree in October 2023. Now I’m developing methods to simulate and handle real-world deformable and granular objects. I enjoy deeply working on robots, seeing them performing tasks for humans, and of course, understanding why they are not doing the right things!! I also devote myself to open-source software development - knowledge should be shared. Before my PhD, I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering from the Guangdong University of Technology in China.

Reach out!

News

• [2025 Feb.] Our paper titled “Differentiable Physics-based System Identification for Robotic Manipulation of Elastoplastic Materials” has been accepted by IJRR! , . project page.
• [2025 Jan.] I have been recruited by a new BBSRC project as a research associate at Cardiff University, working on the development of an automatic/robotised biology lab.
• [2025 Jan.] Our new preprent titled “AutomaChef: A Physics-informed Demonstration-guided Learning Framework for Granular Material Manipulation” is now online
• [2024 Jan.] Our new preprint titled “Gam: General Affordance-Based Manipulation for Contact-Rich Object Disentangling Tasks” is now online , with video demo .

Representative Publications

2025	Yang, X., Lai Y., Ji Z.Differentiable Physics-based System Identification for Robotic Manipulation of Elastoplastic Materials. IJRR (Accepted). (Preprint )
2024	Yang, X., Wu J., Lai Y., Ji Z. Gam: General Affordance-Based Manipulation for Contact-Rich Object Disentangling Tasks. Neurocomputing. (Preprint )
2023	Yang, X. Robotic Manipulation via Hierarchical and Affordance Learning. PhD thesis.
2023	Yang, X., Ji, Z., Wu, J., Lai, Y. Recent Advances of Deep Robotic Affordance Learning: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective. IEEE TCDS. (Preprint )
2021	Yang, X., Ji, Z., Wu, J., Lai, Y. An Open-Source Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning Environment for Robotic Manipulation with Pybullet. TAROS.
2021	Yang, X., Ji, Z., Wu, J., Lai, Y., Wei, C., Liu, G. & Setchi, R. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Universal Policies for Multi-Step Robotic Manipulation. IEEE TNNLS.