Hu Hanyang
I am a Master’s student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, specializing in Intelligent Systems, Robotics & Control. At the Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab, I work on real-time pose and kinematics estimation for surgical instruments. My current research combines rendering, evolutionary optimization, and visual perception to make instrument tracking faster and more robust.
I graduated from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Mathematics and received the Ho Family Prize as the best overall student in applied mathematics. At NUS, I participated in the Special Programme in Mathematics and worked with Prof. Jonathan Scarlett on high-dimensional Bayesian optimization and efficient Gaussian processes for model-based planning. From 2022 to 2024, I was the software team lead at NUS Calibur Robotics, where I led data collection and developed perception, localization, and planning systems.
Latest Publication
Real-time Rendering-based Surgical Instrument Tracking via Evolutionary Optimization
Hanyang Hu, Zekai Liang, Florian Richter, and Michael C. Yip — IROS 2026
We combine CMA-ES with GPU-batched rendering to jointly estimate surgical-instrument pose and visible joint configurations in real time. The framework improves both runtime and reconstruction accuracy over differentiable-rendering baselines and supports joint angle-free and bi-manual tracking. Paper · Project note
Recent Projects
- Wasserstein Policy Optimization. A MATH 277A study project for understanding WPO and reproducing its qualitative behavior in mixture-of-Gaussians and inverted-pendulum examples.
- Forced Variational Integrator Networks with Unit Quaternions. An extension of LieFVINs to $S^3$, including a sign-invariance constraint for the double cover of rotations.
- Efficient Gaussian Processes for Model-Based Planning. My NUS capstone exploration of scalable GP corrections, variational conditioning, and deep kernels in a TD-MPC-style planning framework.
You can find the full archive on the publications and projects and blogs pages, or read my latest resume.