Wanting Yao

I’m a first-year robotics master’s student at GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, advised by Prof. Nadia Figueroa. My current research focuses on elastic Neural ODEs.

Prior to this, I worked with Prof. Yanchao Yang at University of Hong Kong as an undergraduate research intern. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Automation with the honor of Outstanding Graduate from Zhejiang University in 2025.

My research interest lies in control theory and robot learning, particularly learning from demonstrations for everyday manipulation tasks. I hope to develop efficient and scalable machine learning algorithms that enhance robots’ ability to interact with the dynamic physical world.