Hi,
I’m Chen Yu.
I am building the future of general-purpose legged robots.
I am a PhD student at Northwestern University (advised by Prof. Sam Kriegman), with over five years of hands-on experience in legged robot sim-to-real transfer. My current research focuses on cross-embodiment control and modular legged robots. A full list of my publications is available on Google Scholar, and all software projects can be found on GitHub.
Self-destruction of legged robots
ICRA, 2026
The policy learns to efficiently self-destruct and move forward. This is the first demonstration of
a robot automatically changing designs on the fly.
Agile modular legged robots
PNAS, 2026
with VAE+BO for morphology optimization and RL+Transformer for morphology-agnostic locomotion
control. This is the first agile modular legged robot.
Learning to jump / backflip / sideflip
IROS, 2024
with a Transformer-based state estimator for prediction of robot height and velocity. This is the
first demonstration of quadrupedal sideflips.
Learning to walk with changing shapes
ICRA, 2023
using morphology-conditioned Transformer. This is the first Transformer-based universal controller
on a real robot.
A quadruped robot climbing tables
RA-L, 2022
using Bayesian optimization. The robot is trained in the real world without simulation.
A quadruped robot walking bipedally
RA-L, 2022
using RL and hardware modifications. This is the first demonstration of a modern quadruped robot
walking bipedally.
I maintain several open-source libraries focused on robot control, simulation, and learning. Most of my work is public by default. Check out my GitHub.
MetaMachine
2025
A simulation framework for modular robots, designed to accelerate research in robot learning and evolutionary robotics.
Capybarish
2025
Capybarish is a lightweight ROS-like communication middleware designed for cloud-based robotics controllers.
CapyRL
2025
CapyRL is a lightweight JAX-based reinforcement learning library that finds the sweet spot between research-friendly and production-ready codebases.
CapyPIV
2025
CapyPIV is a simple web application for performing Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) analysis using OpenPIV.
CapyFormer
2025
A lightweight Transformer library for locomotion control.
CapyVAE
2025
A simple, flexible VAE (Variational Autoencoder) library for design optimization.