First PhD Student Graduated: CAO Yuhong!

My first PhD student, Mr. Yuhong CAO, has successfully defended his thesis and has been awarded the title of Doctor (PhD) in Mechanical Engineering from NUS! I could not have asked for a better first PhD graduate, congratulations Yuhong!!

Yuhong’s PhD work has focused on informative path planning problems for robotics, such as the orienteering problem, autonomous robotic exploration, and navigation in unknown environments. His first work, which focused on the more abstract multi-agent traveling salesman project, was also awarded the Best Student Paper award at DARS 2022! During his PhD, Yuhong developped a context-aware framework that can be adapted/generalized to all these robotic tasks, in which agents can learn to sequence local, reactive decisions that are informed by their entire belief over the system, to avoid myopic decision-making and truly optimize long-term information-gathering objectives. You can find all of Yuhong’s papers in the publication page. Yuhong is also staying with us through his postdoc, so stay tuned to keep up with his exciting new ideas!