Sha Yi

headshot_small.jpeg stand_w_robot.jpeg

[Yisha] [伊 莎] yswhynot at gmail dot com

I am a Member of Technical Staff at Physical Intelligence, and an incoming Assistant Professor at New York University (Tandon MAE and Courant CS).

Prior to this, I was a Postdoc at UC San Diego with Xiaolong Wang and Mike Tolley. I completed my PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University coadvised by Katia Sycara and Zeynep Temel, where I was supported by the CMU Presidential Fellowship.

I also spent time at Amazon Robotics, Microsoft, and a couple of early-stage startups.

News

2026-06 I gave a talk at Sense of Space Workshop in CVPR 2026.
2026-05 I will join NYU (joint Tandon MAE and Courant CS ) as an Assistant Professor in 2027!
2025-10 I'm selected as a Rising Star at the MIT EECS Rising Star workshop in Boston.
2025-09 I co-organized a workshop at CoRL 2025 on Human to Robot (H2R) Workshop.
2025-05 We organized a workshop at RSS 2025 on Brain and Brawn - Robot Hardware-Aware Intelligence. [webpage]

Selected Publications

  1. TactX: Learning Shared Tactile Representations Across Diverse Sensors
    under review, 2026
  2. Generating Robot Hands from Human Demonstrations
    under review, 2026
  3. taco_icon.jpg
    TacO: Benchmarking Tactile Sensors for Object Manipulation
    under review, 2026
  4. Contact-Aware Neural Dynamics
    In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026
  5. Cross-embodied Co-design for Dexterous Hands
    Kehlani Fay, Darin Djapri, Anya Zorin, James Clinton, Ali El Lahib, Hao Su, Michael T. Tolley, Sha Yi, and Xiaolong Wang
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
  6. reward_icra2026.jpg
    Learning to Design Soft Hands using Reward Models
    In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
  7. Co-Design of Soft Gripper with Neural Physics
    Sha Yi, Xueqian Bai, Adabhav Singh, Jianglong Ye, Michael T Tolley, and Xiaolong Wang
    In Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025
  8. Reconfigurable Robot Swarms for Terrain Traversal with Passive Coupling Mechanisms
    Sha Yi, Shashwat Singh, Allison Seo, Ryan St. Pierre, Katia Sycara, and Zeynep Temel
    Autonomous Robots, 2025
  9. Reconfigurable Robot Control Using Flexible Coupling Mechanisms
    Sha Yi, Katia Sycara, and Zeynep Temel
    In Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2023
  10. Configuration Control for Physical Coupling of Heterogeneous Robot Swarms
    Sha Yi, Zeynep Temel, and Katia Sycara
    In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022