Yuxiang Ma

PhD Candidate, MIT Mechanical Engineering

I am a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. I am advised by Prof. Edward Adelson, and I also collaborated with Prof. Yilun Du . My research focuses on the intersection of visuo-tactile perception and embodied AI, spanning the full robotics pipeline — from tactile sensor design and hardware engineering to foundation model learning and policy deployment for complex real-world manipulation.

I am particularly interested in overcoming the robotic "data bottleneck" by building scalable, interactive data-collection frameworks with richer sensing modalities. In Summer 2025, I interned at the Robotics and AI Institute, where I worked with Team Capture to integrate force-torque and tactile sensors with handheld UMI-style device for portable, multimodal manipulation data collection.

I received my B.Eng. from the Tsien Excellence in Engineering Program (TEEP) at Tsinghua University in 2020. I also spent time as an undergraduate researcher in the Xu Group at UC San Diego, working on wearable ultrasound imaging and elastography.

In my spare time, I enjoy doing all kinds of sports, such as weightlifting, skiing, climbing, badminton, basketball and etc.

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