Research Background
Undergraduate Assistant Researcher
Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab (ARCLab) @ UCSDApril 2025 - Present
I mainly work with PhD Student Lucas Liang and Professor Michael Yip.
My work focuses on markerless robot pose tracking in unstructured environments. We leverage advanced computer vision to enable autonomous calibration and control for various morphologies—from surgical instruments to snake robots—in the wild.
Publications
Efficient Surgical Robotic Instrument Pose Reconstruction in Real World Conditions Using Unified Feature Detection
Zekai Liang, Kazuya Miyata, Xiao Liang, Florian Richter, Michael C. Yip
Submitted to ICRA 2026 • October 2025
Accurate camera-to-robot calibration is essential for vision-based robotic control, especially in minimally invasive surgery. We propose a novel framework that unifies the detection of geometric primitives through a shared encoding, training on large-scale synthetic data to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy in challenging surgical environments.