I am an undergraduate at Northwestern University, majoring in Computer Science at the McCormick School of Engineering. My research interests are robot learning, foundation models for robotics, and reinforcement learning.
Apr 2026Awarded the Northwestern Summer Undergraduate Research Grant.
Feb 2026Awarded the Northwestern Academic Year Research Grant.
Jan 2026Started research at the IDEAS Lab, contributing to SENTINEL and SENTINEl-lite which benchmark VLA policies on safety awareness via formal verifications.
Jan 2026Started research with Prof. Naichen Shi on Generative Bayesian filtering for laser powder-bed fusion monitoring.
Jan 2026Started research at the MAGICS Lab on experimenting cross-embodiment imitation learning benchmarks.
Sep 2025Started B.S. in Computer Science at Northwestern University.
An online Generative Bayesian Filtering algorithm for laser powder-bed fusion (LPBF) defect monitoring that uses conditional VAEs as learned likelihoods.
OpenSO-101: A Unified Framework for Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Sim2Real on the SO-101
Open-source NVIDIA Isaac Lab framework for the LeRobot SO-101 arm that unifies PPO+Distillation, ACT, and Diffusion Policy training under a single CLI / Python API with a real-arm deployment bridge, backed by 80+ unit tests. A shared joint-position action space in LeRobot motor units lets one checkpoint play back in Isaac Sim and deploy on a Feetech follower with no sim-to-real conversion, alongside unified visual / observation / physics domain randomization across Lift, PickPlace, and Stack.
Autonomous Mobile Robot Manipulation with ROS2
Jixin Yan
Personal ProjectOngoing
A modular 8-package ROS 2 Humble autonomy stack for TurtleBot3 mobile manipulation in Gazebo, with custom messages and actions (DetectedObject, TaskStatus, PickPlace) coordinating the perception → navigation → manipulation loop through a central task-manager node. Integrates Nav2 with a pick-place action server plus rosbag2 recording and a success-rate eval pipeline, with pluggable manipulation backends ready for future MoveIt 2 and learned-policy (ACT / Diffusion) integration.
Bimanual Hardware Benchmarking for Imitation Learning
A controlled study of how hardware fidelity propagates through the imitation-learning pipeline — from teleoperation data collection to policy deployment — comparing DOBOT X-Trainer Nova2 and AgileX PiPER bimanual platforms on peg insertion, towel folding, and object handover. The benchmark measures per-platform teleop success under latency, precision, and motion-scaling differences and pairs 25 demonstrations per task with ACT and Diffusion Policy training to relate policy-performance gaps to upstream data quality.
Automated pipeline that detects pores and keyholes in X-ray welding videos with Grounded SAM, then labels each frame by pore-generation type across four states and aggregates trajectories into a transition-probability matrix for downstream defect modeling.
SpiderPi Hexapod: Gait Control and Autonomous Exploration
Jixin Yan
Introduction to Robotics Lab, Northwestern UniversityJan 2025 – Mar 2025
A 6-DOF hexapod platform with tripod and wave gaits driven by inverse kinematics and IMU-based PD feedback, paired with A* planning over a discretized occupancy grid and a subsumption-based reactive controller for real-time obstacle avoidance. Includes a frontier-based exploration pipeline that incrementally builds the map and prioritizes frontiers by information gain for autonomous coverage.
Scout4One: Soccer Player Market-Value Prediction
Jixin Yan
Personal ProjectNov 2024
A soccer player market-value prediction system with XGBoost and LightGBM ensembles trained on 30,000+ records and 31 engineered features, tuned via Optuna Bayesian search to reduce RMSE by 15%. Deployed as a Streamlit dashboard with 6 interactive analytics views.
Selected Honors
2026Northwestern Academic Year Undergraduate Research Grant
2026Northwestern Summer Undergraduate Research Grant