Uksang Yoo (유욱상)

Robotics PhD Student at CMU RI

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Newell-Simon Hall

Hamerschlag Dr.

Pittsburgh, PA, USA 15213

I am a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Robotics Institute (RI) co-advised by Jean Oh and Jeffrey Ichnowski. I am a member of RI’s BIG lab and Momentum lab. I am broadly interested in perceiving deformation of the manipulated objects or the robot and learning to cause deformations. Specifically, I have worked on developing methods to leverage the compliance of deformable robots and reason about contact for dexterous and delicate manipulation tasks. Additionally, I work on reasoning about continuous deformations of soft/deformable objects in contact-rich manipulation tasks. You can reach me at my email: uyoo at cs.cmu.edu.

I received my B.Sc. in Mathematics (2020) and in Mechanical Engineering (2021) at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was inspired to study continuous deformations and representation of continuum structures with both theoretical and practical approaches. I am honored to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Program.

news

Nov 09, 2024 I’m co-organizing a CoRL 2024 workshop on lifelong learning for home robots Workshop Site!
Sep 27, 2024 We presented at ICRA@40 on the preliminary results of behavior cloning for clay manipulation and it was featured on IEEE Spectrum
Sep 10, 2024 Our paper on learning from demonstration for robotic pottery with structural priors was accepted to Humanoids 2024! :tada:
Jul 29, 2024 I gave an invited talk at USC’s Summer Robotics Seminar Series titled “Manipulation with and of soft bodies: learning to perceive and reason about deformations!” :tada:
Mar 27, 2024 We demoed our artistic robots (portrait drawing, co-painting, dexterous soft hands) at MARS! :relaxed:

selected publications

  1. pen.gif
    Soft Robotic Dynamic In-Hand Pen Spinning
    Yunchao Yao ,  Uksang Yoo ,  Jean Oh , and 2 more authors
    In [Under Review] , 2025
    PDF
  2. mohair.gif
    Soft and Compliant Contact-Rich Hair Manipulation and Care
    Uksang Yoo ,  Nathaniel Dennler ,  Eliot Xing , and 4 more authors
    In [Under Review] , 2025
    PDF
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    RoPotter: Toward Robotic Pottery and Deformable Object Manipulation with Structural Priors
    Uksang Yoo* ,  Adam Hung* ,  Jonathan Francis , and 2 more authors
    In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) , 2024
    PDF
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    MOE-Touch More Deformation: Shape-Based Soft Robotic Contact Estimation for Manipulation
    Uksang Yoo ,  Sarvesh Patil ,  Eliot Xing , and 4 more authors
    In [Under Review] , 2024
    PDF
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    Inclusion in Assistive Haircare Robotics: Practical and Ethical Considerations in Hair Manipulation
    Uksang Yoo ,  Nathaniel Dennler ,  Sarvesh Patil , and 2 more authors
    In Third Workshop on Inclusive HRI , 2024
    PDF
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    MOE-Hair: Toward Soft and Compliant Contact-rich Hair Manipulation and Care [Best LBR at HRI 2024]
    Uksang Yoo ,  Nathaniel Dennler ,  Maja Mataric , and 3 more authors
    In Late Breaking Report, International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) , 2024
    PDF
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    POE: Acoustic Soft Robotic Proprioception for Omnidirectional End-effectors
    Uksang Yoo ,  Ziven Lopez ,  Jeffrey Ichnowski , and 1 more author
    In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , 2024
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    Toward Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Pneumatic Soft Robot 3D Proprioceptive Sensing
    Uksang Yoo ,  Hanwen Zhao ,  Alvaro Altamirano , and 2 more authors
    In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , 2023
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  9. tmech.png
    Influence of antagonistic tensions on distributed friction forces of multisegment tendon-driven continuum manipulators with irregular geometry
    Yang Liu ,  Uksang Yoo ,  Seungbeom Ha , and 2 more authors
    IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2022
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  10. assembly.png
    In-Hand Pose Estimation with Optical Tactile Sensor for Robotic Electronics Assembly
    Uksang Yoo ,  and  Wenzhen Yuan
    2022
    PDF
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    Analytical Design of a Pneumatic Elastomer Robot With Deterministically Adjusted Stiffness
    Uksang Yoo ,  Yang Liu ,  Ashish D Deshpande , and 1 more author
    IEEE robotics and automation letters, 2021
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  12. Toward Analytical Modeling and Evaluation of Curvature-Dependent Distributed Friction Force in Tendon-Driven Continuum Manipulators
    Yang Liu ,  Seong Hyo Ahn ,  Uksang Yoo , and 2 more authors
    In 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) , 2020
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