My name is Yiming Li. I am currently a second year PhD student in the Robot Learning & Interaction group at the Idiap Research Institute and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), supervised by Dr. Sylvain Calinon.

I am broadly interested in planning, manipulation, and learning for robotic systems that interact with their surroundings and humans. Currently, my focus is on geometric representations for learning and optimization. During my master’s, I worked on learning-based approaches for robotic grasping in cluttered environments.

🔥 News

2024.07: Configuration space distance fields - Best Paper Finalist at RSS 2024!
2024.05: Configuration space distance fields accepted to RSS 2024
2024.04: Online learning signed distance fields accepted to RA-L
2024.01: Robot geometry as distance fields accepted to ICRA 2024
2022.10: Started PhD at Robot Learning & Interaction group
2022.08: Human-to-robot handovers accepted to IEEE T-CDS
2022.08: Variational grasp generation accepted to RA-L
2022.01: Anthropomorphic hand grasping in clutter accepted to ICRA 2022
2021.07: 6-DoF grasp pose estimation accepted to IROS 2022

📝 Selected Publications

Please visit my Google Scholar page for full publications.

From Movement Primitives to Distance Fields to Dynamical Systems

Yiming Li and Sylvain Calinon

arXiv:2504.09705.

paper interactive page code

A Riemannian Take on Distance Fields and Geodesic Flows in Robotics

Yiming Li, Jiacheng Qiu, Sylvain Calinon

arXiv:2412.05197.

paper website

Configuration Space Distance Fields for Manipulation Planning

Yiming Li, Xuemin Chi, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

In Proc. Robotics: Science and Systems 2024 (RSS 2024).

Best Paper Award Finalist

paper website code

Online Learning of Continuous Signed Distance Fields Using Piecewise Polynomials

Ante Marić, Yiming Li, Sylvain Calinon

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 9 (6), 6020-6026.

paper website code

Representing Robot Geometry as Distance Fields: Applications to Whole-body Manipulation

Yiming Li, Yan Zhang, Amirreza Razmjoo, Sylvain Calinon

In Proc. IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation 2024 (ICRA 2024).

paper website code

HGC-Net: Deep Anthropomorphic Hand Grasping in Clutter

Yiming Li, Wei Wei, Daheng Li, Peng Wang, Wanyi Li, Jun Zhong

In Proc. IEEE Intl Conf. on Robotics and Automation 2022 (ICRA 2022).

paper code

Learning Human-to-robot Dexterous Handovers for Anthropomorphic Hand

Hoanan Duan, Peng Wang, Yiming Li, Daheng Li, Wei Wei

IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems(T-CDS) 15 (3), 1224-1238.

paper

DVGG: Deep Variational Grasp Generation for Dextrous Manipulation

Wei Wei, Daheng Li, Peng Wang, Yiming Li, Wanyi Li,Yongkang Luo, Jun Zhong

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) 7 (2), 1659-1666.

paper

Simultaneous Semantic and Collision Learning for 6-dof Grasp Pose Estimation

Yiming Li, Tao Kong, Ruihang Chu, Yifeng Li, Peng Wang, Lei Li

In Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2022 (IROS 2022).

paper

📖 Educations

2022.10 - now, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
2019.06 - 2022.06, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
2015.09 - 2019.06, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

📞 Contact

Email: ymli.cn@gmail.com
Telephone: (+41) 77 278 38 48
Address: Idiap Research Institute, Centre du Parc, Rue Marconi 19, CH-1920 Martigny, Switzerland