I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Seattle Research Lab (SRL) at NVIDIA, working on robotics and AI. My research interests include generalist robot policies, evaluation and benchmarking. I received my Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, and my B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, with a major in Aerospace.

You can contact me at xuningy at nvidia dot com.

Highlights

• 07/2026 Gave two invited talks: Australian Centre for Robotics at the University of Sydney and University of New South Wales
• 07/2026 Gave a talk at the RSS 2026 workshop Toward Open-World Failure Recovery for Robots
• 07/2026 Invited panelist at the RSS 2026 workshop Trustworthy Embodied Foundation Models
• 07/2026 Wrote a blog on how to evaluate general-purpose robot policies for real-world deployment
• 04/2026 RoboLab has been accepted to RSS 2026 (29.7% AR)!
• 04/2026 AdaVoMP has been accepted to ICML 2026 (26.6% AR)!
• 04/2026 RoboLab is released! Highlighted in Nvidia’s National Robotics Week
• 05/2024 Built an automatic pick-and-place pipeline in simulation in collaboration with Intrinsic.AI: TechCrunch, AI Business, The Robot Report
• 2019 In-place hover-to-hover flip of a quadrotor, featured by Rapyuta Robotics

Selected publications

1. RoboLab: A High-Fidelity Simulation Benchmark for Analysis of Task Generalist Policies X. Yang, R. Dagli, A. Zook, H. Hadfield, A. Goyal, S. Birchfield, F. Ramos, J. Tremblay RSS 2026 bibtex paper code project

2. Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI NVIDIA Cosmos3 Team arXiv 2026 paper code models project

3. VoLo: A Physical Orchestrator for Open-Vocabulary Long-Horizon Manipulation S. Chen, H. Hadfield, A. Zook, M.A. Uy, C.H. Song, E. Coumans, X. Yang, F. Ladhak, Q. Qu, S. Birchfield, J. Tremblay, V. Blukis CoRL 2026 under review paper project

4. AdaVoMP: Adaptive Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields Invariant to Resolution R. Dagli, D. Xiang, V. Modi, X. Yang, G. State, D.I.W. Levin, M. Shugrina ICML 2026 paper project

5. VLA-0: Building State-of-the-Art VLAs with Zero Modification A. Goyal, H. Hadfield, X. Yang, V. Blukis, F. Ramos arXiv 2025 paper code project

6. Robot Policy Evaluation for Sim-to-Real Transfer: A Benchmarking Perspective X. Yang, C. Eppner, J. Tremblay, D. Fox, S. Birchfield, F. Ramos RSS 2025 WS bibtex paper

7. RoboArena: Distributed Real-World Evaluation of Generalist Robot Policies RoboArena team RSS 2025 bibtex paper

8. Inference-Time Policy Steering through Human Interactions Y. Wang, L. Wang, Y. Du, B. Sundaralingam, X. Yang, Y.-W. Chao, C. Pérez-D’Arpino, D. Fox, J. Shah ICRA 2025 bibtex paper project

9. Aim My Robot: Precision Local Navigation to Any Object X. Meng, X. Yang, S. Jung, F. Ramos, S. S. Jujjavarapu, S. Paul, D. Fox RAL 2025 bibtex paper project

10. Fast Explicit-Input Assistance for Teleoperation in Clutter N. Walker, X. Yang, A. Garg, M. Cakmak, D. Fox, C. Pérez-D’Arpino IROS 2024 bibtex paper code

11. Assisted Mobile Robot Teleoperation with Intent-aligned Trajectories via Biased Incremental Action Sampling X. Yang, N. Michael IROS 2020 bibtex paper code talk

12. Fast and Agile Vision-Based Flight with Teleoperation and Collision Avoidance on a Multirotor A. Spitzer*, X. Yang*, J. Yao, A. Dhawale, K. Goel, M. Dabhi, M. Collins, C. Boirum, N. Michael ISER 2018 bibtex paper video

Some Old Robots

Rocky with GPS: Modifications for outdoor flights

Rocky: Compact, agile quadrotor with onboard compute

Rocky Lite: Minimally compact and agile quadrotor