Xiao Liang

I am currently a Second-year Ph.D student at UCSD Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab (ARClab), advised by Prof. Michael Yip. Prior to that, I received a M.S in Computer Science degree at UCSD and a B.S in Computer Science at University of Washington.

Google Scholar / Email / Github / Resume

Research

I'm interested in the intersecting fields of robotics, physics simulation, and machine learning. I develop machine learning algorithms and physics simulation models to achieve robot autonomy in manipulation tasks, specially involving soft, deformable objects in surgical scenarios.

Publications
	Humanoids in Hospitals: A Technical Study of Humanoid Surrogates for Dexterous Medical Interventions Soofiyan Atar, Xiao Liang, Calvin Joyce, Florian Richter, Ricardo Wood, Charles Goldberg, Preetham Suresh, Michael Yip [Paper link][Website][Video]
	AutoPeel: Adhesion-aware Safe Peeling Trajectory Optimization for Robotic Wound Care Xiao Liang, Youcheng Zhang, Fei Liu, Florian Richter, Michael C. Yip IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025, [Best Paper Finalist]. [Paper link]
	MEDiC: Autonomous Surgical Robotic Assistance to Maximizing Exposure for Dissection and Cautery Xiao Liang, Chung-pang Wang, Nikhil Shinde, Fei Liu, Florian Richter, Michael C. Yip IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025, [Best Workshop Paper Finalist @ELSR]. [Paper link]
	Investigating Low Data, Confidence Aware Image Prediction on Smooth Repetitive Videos using Gaussian Processes Nikhil Shinde, Xiao Liang, Florian Richter, Sylvia Lee Herbert, Michael C. Yip IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), 2024. [Paper link]
	JIGGLE: An Active Sensing Framework for Boundary Parameters Estimation in Deformable Surgical Environments Xiao Liang, Nikhil Shinde, Fei Liu, Yutong Zhang, Florian Richter, Sylvia Lee Herbert, Michael C. Yip Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2024, [Best Workshop Abstract @ICRA2025]. [Paper link]
	Real-to-Sim Deformable Object Manipulation: Optimizing Physics Models with Residual Mappings for Robotic Surgery Xiao Liang, Fei Liu, Yutong Zhang, Yuelei Li, Shan Lin, Michael C. Yip IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. [Paper link]
	Achieving Autonomous Cloth Manipulation with Optimal Control via Differentiable Physics-Aware Regularization and Safety Constraints Yutong Zhang, Fei Liu, Xiao Liang,Michael C. Yip IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024. [Paper link]
	ORRN: An ODE-Based Recursive Registration Network for Deformable Respiratory Motion Estimation With Lung 4DCT Images Xiao Liang, Shan Lin, Fei Liu, Dimitri Schreiber, Michael C. Yip IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (TBME), 2023 [Paper link] [Code]