Hello, welcome to Yayun(Daisy) Du’s website. I am a Ph.D. student in Robotics and Control with a minor in solid mechanics at UCLA. Born and raised in a rural village in China, I have been thinking about freeing labor with my parents being farmers. To this end, I chose robotics design and control as my research subject. As an interdisciplinary field, my robotic research involves system design (rigid/flexible PCB board design included), control, artificial intelligence, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and physics-based machine learning-assisted mechanics analysis. With extraordinary leadership, I have been leading several projects since I started my Ph.D. In my doctoral research, I have been working on several projects and collaborating with multiple groups. First, I designed a simple but functional robot with soft straight tails to swim in granular media, and experimental data showed reasonable quantitative agreement with numerical simulation results. Then, using the same robot, I studied its locomotion in fluids and enabled the robot to follow any prescribed 2D trajectory. Meanwhile, I’ve built a low-cost agri-robot with autonomous recharge, navigation, and weed detection (with deep learning) in flax fields, and I have been connecting with plant science researchers from NDSU to test our robot. Based on the agri-robot, I gathered preliminary data for a successful $450k federal grant from the US Dept. of Agriculture and also prepared 33% of an NSF proposal with four PIs ($1.2M) that received ratings of 3 Very Good and 1 Fair (eventually declined). I also collaborated with another NDSU painting group on autonomous robotic painting.
What I am doing Now?
Update 03/18/2021