Yifei Dong

Hi there! I’m a PhD student at KTH in Stockholm, working with Prof. Florian T. Pokorny and Xianyi Cheng at Duke. I hold an M.Sc. from ETH Zürich and a B.Sc. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My résumé is available here.

My research explores the fundamental principles that enable robust manipulation, with the broader goal of achieving human-level robustness in robotic systems. I focus on manipulation of rigid and deformable objects via nonprehensile or tool-assisted interactions. I combine hardware–control co-design, energy-based caging analysis, and reinforcement learning to develop robust manipulation strategies that are transferable from simulation to the real world.