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

• [2024 Jan.] Our new preprint titled “Gam: General Affordance-Based Manipulation for Contact-Rich Object Disentangling Tasks” is now online , with video demo .
• [2023 Sep.] My PhD thesis is now available on ORCA!
• [2023 Aug.] Congratulations to my colleague Yan Gao for his accepted paper “Efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Mapless Navigation with Predictive Neighbouring Space Scoring” on T-ASE!
• [2023 Aug.] Congratulations to myself for passing the viva which took 5.5 hours!

Recent Publications

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	Gao, Y., Wu, J., Yang, X., Ji, Z. Efficient Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Mapless Navigation with Predictive Neighbouring Space Scoring. T-ASE.
2023	T Zhang, Y Liu, X Yang., J Chen, J Huang. Home health care routing and scheduling in densely populated communities considering complex human behaviours. Computers & Industrial Engineering.
2023	Yang, X., Ji, Z., Wu, J., Lai, Y. Recent Advances of Deep Robotic Affordance Learning: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective. IEEE TCDS. (Preprint )
2022	Yang, X., Ji, Z., Wu, J., Lai, Y. Abstract Demonstrations and Adaptive Exploration for Efficient and Stable Multi-step Sparse Reward Reinforcement Learning. ICAC.
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.