Hello! I’m Yufei Jiang. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Penn State University, with a research focus on aerial manipulation.

Research Interest

My research focuses on aerial robotics and embodied autonomy, with an emphasis on enabling aerial robots to perceive, reason, and physically interact with complex real-world environments. I am particularly interested in bridging the gap between high-level intelligence and low-level robotic execution through tightly integrated perception, learning, planning, state estimation, and control.

A major direction of my research is aerial manipulation in unstructured environments. I study how aerial robots equipped with robotic manipulators can perform precise and reliable physical interaction despite floating-base dynamics, limited onboard sensing, environmental disturbances, and uncertainty. My work explores whole-body control, perception-aware motion generation, robust state estimation, and learning-based policies for manipulation beyond controlled laboratory settings.

I am also interested in learning-based embodied intelligence, including generative visuomotor policies and vision-language-action models. In particular, I aim to develop hierarchical robotic systems in which high-level models reason about tasks and semantic goals, perception-conditioned policies generate feasible behaviors from local observations, and model-based controllers ensure safe and dynamically consistent execution.

More broadly, my long-term goal is to develop robotic systems that combine intelligent algorithms with capable hardware and can operate reliably in the physical world. Beyond aerial robots, I am interested in robot design and general-purpose embodied systems that can extend human capabilities and make robotics increasingly practical, versatile, and accessible.