Yulun Tian’s Academic Website

I will be joining the Robotics Department at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025! Stay tuned for the launch of my research group.

I am passionate about developing scalable and trustworthy multi-agent systems that operate robustly over long periods of time without human intervention. My current research applies tools from nonlinear and distributed optimization, graph theory, differential geometry, and machine learning to develop principled algorithms with theoretical guarantees and real-world systems for multi-agent perception and navigation.

I am a postdoc at UCSD working with Prof. Nikolay Atanasov starting August 2024. Previously, I was a postdoc at MIT LIDS and the AeroAstro department. I received my PhD degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in August 2023, with a focus on autonomous systems. During my PhD, I was very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jonathan How. Prior to PhD, I received my SM degree (2019) from MIT and BA degree (2017) from UC Berkeley.

Selected News

  • [06/2024] Very excited to serve as an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR).
  • [10/2023] New paper on rotation averaging and Laplacian solvers accepted at IEEE T-RO. Check out the paper and related talk!
  • [04/2023] Our Kimera-Multi won the 2022 IEEE T-RO King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award! 🎉 More about our work in IEEE news article.

Selected Awards and Honors

  • Best Paper Award, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2022.
  • Outstanding Reviewer, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023.
  • Honorable Mention for Best Paper, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2021.
  • Honorable Mention for Best Paper, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020.

Recent Videos

Resilient and Distributed Multi-Robot Visual SLAM (2023)
Rotation Averaging via Fast Laplacian Solvers (2023)