Hi there 👋
I'm Yifu Tian. I go by Joseph. I'm now working at Shanghai Jiao Tong University as a visiting student under the supervision of Prof. Tong Qin. I will join George Washington University in Fall 2026 as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Chuchu Chen.
I received my B.Eng. in Electrical Computer Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2025.
Previously:
- I was a visiting student at ICT@CAS.
- I worked as a research assistant at AIRS.
- I was also a visiting scholar at UIUC, Thomas M. Siebel Center for CS.
- After graduating from CUHK-Shenzhen, I worked as a research assistant in FAST Lab@Zhejiang University.
Yifu (Joseph) Tian
Visiting Student@ SJTU
Incoming PhD student@ GWU
Email: josepht@gwmail.gwu.edu
- March, 2026: I started my internship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
- June, 2025: I received B.Eng. in Electrical Computer Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Yifu Tian, Xinhang Xu, Thien-Minh Nguyen, Muqing Cao
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026(Under Review)
Paper / Video / Code /
In extreme environments, tethered robots require continuous navigation while avoiding cable entanglement. Traditional planners struggle in these lifelong planning scenarios due to topological unawareness, while topology-augmented graphsearch methods face computational bottlenecks in obstaclerich environments where the number of candidate topological classes increases. To address these challenges, we propose Topological Motion Planning Diffusion (TMPD), a novel generative planning framework that integrates lifelong topological memory. Benchmarking in obstacle-rich simulated environments demonstrates that TMPD achieves a collision-free reach of 100% and a tangle-free rate of 97.0%, outperforming traditional topological search and purely kinematic diffusion baselines in both geometric smoothness and computational efficiency. Simulation with AGX-Dynamics for unity further validates the practicality of the proposed approach.
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The George Wahington University, Washington D.C., USA
ME PhD in Robotics • Aug. 2026 to Present
Advisor: Prof. Chuchu CHEN
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The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China
B.Eng in ECE • Aug. 2021 to Jun. 2025
Academic Advisor: Prof. Pooi-Yuen KAM
I also upload videos about my research on Bilibili. My goal is to record my academic growth. Feel free to watch here.
- Hiking, FPV, History, League of Legends.