William Yang

I am a robotics researcher working toward making our robots capable of reliably achieving highly dynamic motions. I am interested in the relevant factors when a robot makes high speed impacts with its environment and how to leverage that insight to develop better controllers. I've developed many controllers for the bipedal robot Cassie, particularly highly dynamic motions such as running and jumping. Currently, I'm working on dynamic manipulation tasks. 

I am a fifth year PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania working at the DAIR lab, advised by Michael Posa and supported under the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Previously, my research focused on discovering optimal gaits of quadruped robots with flexible spines with C. David Remy at the University of Michigan where I obtained my Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and my Bachelor's in Computer Science Engineering. I spent two undergraduate summers in Seattle as a software development intern at Amazon in the Supply Chain Optimization and AWS divisions.