Portrait of Yecheng (Geoffrey) WANG

CV / GitHub / LinkedIn

mn232yw@leeds.ac.uk

Yecheng (Geoffrey) WANG 「王烨澄」

Applying to PhD programs in robotics · Fall 2027

BEng Mechanical Engineering @ University of Leeds BEng Mechanical Design, Manufacturing and Automation @ Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU) Expected Graduation: Jul 2027 (2+2 Joint Program)

Standing at the convergence of Embodied AI and Surgical Robots, I am determined to make the most advanced technology affordable and accessible.

Goal
Surgical robots that are precise enough to trust and simple enough to afford.
Research Interests
Continuum Robot Modeling and Control · Learning-based Autonomy · Physically Grounded Motion Prediction and Planning.
Current Question
How few DoF a flexible endoscopic instrument needs, and how to close the gap between its commanded and actual motion.

Research

Surgical Robotics & Instrumentation Lab (SRIL), CUHK, Hong Kong SAR Jun 2026 – Present

PI: Prof. Shing Shin CHENG · Mentor: Dr. Jun HUO

Poster: From Millimetres to Microns (CUHK SURP 2026)

From Millimetres to Microns: Hysteresis Compensation of a Cable-Driven Continuum Surgical Robot

Jun 2026 – Aug 2026 · CUHK Summer Undergraduate Research Programme

Cable hysteresis was the dominant error source; compensating it cut tip error 3.0× (234 → 78 µm), and an iterative learning layer brought it to ~15 µm.

I rebuilt a 14-notch tendon-driven continuum surgical robot with stereo tip tracking and cable-tension sensing, and identified path-dependent cable hysteresis as the dominant error source. I then designed a data-driven hysteresis compensator and a P-type iterative learning controller for the 0.25 s vision latency, and showed that tip loading widens the hysteresis loop, contradicting a friction-only assumption. The compensator was validated under a preregistered protocol on a sealed multi-target benchmark; the learning layer then approached the platform’s repeatability limit.

poster / project page

Task-Conditioned Kinematic Coverage of Reduced-DoF Continuum Robots for Endoscopic Surgery

Aug 2026 – Present

Can a fixed-structure 4-DoF continuum arm execute each surgical gesture within position and tool-axis tolerances — and if not, why not?

I built a kinematic simulation that tests each gesture against these tolerances, attributes failures to reach or position–axis coupling, and benchmarks four comparators. Next, I plan to replace synthetic primitives with instrument trajectories from open dVRK datasets, identify the arm’s bending structure from EM tip tracking, and validate per-gesture predictions in teleoperation on a dual-arm flexible endoscopic platform.

Physically Grounded Counterfactual World Models for Explainable Motion Prediction and Planning

Dec 2025 – Present · KineWorld (AAAI 2027, advanced to Phase 2) · PHLEX (ICLR 2027, under review)

Explain a frozen predictor’s trajectories with differentiable motion mechanisms, then re-run those explanations as physically grounded counterfactual futures.

KineWorld is a pluggable world model that decodes a frozen predictor’s trajectories against a library of differentiable motion mechanisms, giving interpretable behavior attribution and counterfactual rollouts; on UniAD/nuScenes it lowered maximum yaw rate from 0.986 to 0.640 rad/s and raised mechanism self-consistency from 8.45% to 57.27%, with gains in comfort, safety and planning accuracy.

PHLEX extends the library into a predictor-agnostic framework that explains predicted trajectories through layered kinematic models, control laws and scene references, and re-runs varied explanations as counterfactual futures for ego planning. On three frozen planners (UniAD, VAD, SparseDrive) it cut collision rate by up to half and yaw-rate violations by 1.9–6.7 pp, and in agent forecasting (UniAD/MTR/QCNet on nuScenes/Argoverse 2) it reduced kinematic violations by >80% for ≤0.05 m minFDE.

Co-researcher, with a PhD student at Purdue University

Publications

Honors

Selected Projects

More projects
  • Helicopter Altitude Control Mar 2025 – Apr 2025
    Implemented and tuned a PID altitude controller for a tethered single-axis helicopter rig, run remotely on the University of Leeds ReLOAD platform: take-off, timed hover within ±2 cm of the target height, and landing. video / code
  • Bridge Load Analysis, Simulation and Manufacture Mar 2025 – Apr 2025
    Modeled a 2D truss bridge from engineering statics, solved the 24-equation system in MATLAB for load simulation, and built a MATLAB GUI that predicts vulnerable members and maximum load capacity. GUI screenshot / truss model / code
  • YOLO-Based Automatic-Checkout Cart Apr 2024 – Apr 2025
    Built a Raspberry Pi 5 cart prototype fusing a fisheye camera and a load cell, with a 2-DoF pan-tilt laser pointer that flags unrecognized items; a YOLOv8n with Multi-Scale Dilated Attention reached 92.4% mAP@0.5 at <1 s/item on the edge device. demo video / slides

Internship