Yuni Fuchioka
渕岡湧仁
yunifuchioka@gmail.com
I am a PhD student at the ETH Zürich Robotic Systems Lab, supervised by professor Marco Hutter. My research interests include contact-rich (loco)manipulation, teleoperation, and robust field deployment for arm-mounted quadrupeds. In terms of algorithms, I am interested in incorporating underlying physics and control theory principles within reinforcement learning based techniques. I wish to some day create robots that can be used for practical disaster response scenarios.
I received a Master's in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Professor Michiel van de Panne, where I did research on reinforcement learning for quadruped robots. I did my undergraduate in Engineering Physics, also at the University of British Columbia. I have done internships at the Honda Research Institute/Honda R&D Humanoid Robotics Group, and at OMRON SINIC X, both in Tokyo Japan.
CV / Email / LinkedIn / GitHub / Twitter
Research
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OPT-Mimic: Imitation of Optimized Trajectories for Dynamic Quadruped Behaviors.
Yuni Fuchioka, Zhaoming Xie, Michiel van de Panne.
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023
Robots
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Open Dynamic Robot Initiative (ODRI) Solo 8 Quadruped
As part of my Master's, I built the Solo 8 robot designed by ODRI, the first in-house quadruped robot in my lab at UBC. This involved sourcing components from 20 different suppliers from 6 countries, physically assembling the robot according to ODRI's instructions, and writing the software infrastructure to enable testing of custom controllers. -
Bicopter Drone
As a personal hobby project, I designed and built a radio controlled drone that flies using only two propellers. Rather than using an off-the-shelf flight controller, I wrote my own PD controller using an Arduino and a cheap IMU. The body was made out of balsa wood since I had limited access to fabrication tools. -
Autonomous Robot Competition
I designed and built an autonomous robot within a 4-member team, for a course project/competition. I did much of the mechanical design for the robot, which was built mostly with laser-cut and glued hardboard. The robot was able to complete all of the required competition tasks and placed 4th out of 16 teams.
Personal
- My family is Japanese, but I was born and raised outside of Japan. I received all of my education in English, in the US and Canada. I consider Vancouver to be my hometown.
- I speak Japanese fluently—I use it exclusively to communicate with my parents, and I have lived in Tokyo (mostly) without people noticing that I grew up overseas. However, my handwriting skills are quite poor due to my lack of formal education in the language.
- Outside of robotics, I love to play, listen to, transcribe, and compose music. I have played trombone in various classical and jazz ensembles since 2007. Back in Vancouver I used to play with the South Van Big Band and the Hudson Street Jazz Orchestra.