01 · About

Kaiyuan (Eric) Chen

I am a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, working with Prof. Ken Goldberg in the Berkeley AUTOLab, part of Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2025, co-advised by Prof. John Kubiatowicz and Prof. Ken Goldberg, and my B.S. summa cum laude from UCLA in 2020, where I worked with Prof. Songwu Lu on wireless networking.

I build the systems that let robots learn and act at scale, and most recently the agentic tooling that lets LLM coding agents program, simulate, and improve robots. I co-lead Graph-as-Policy (GaP) (CoRL 2026 Spotlight, top 3.4%), a multi-agent self-learning harness in which LLM agents write, verify, and optimize executable behavior graphs for variational automation tasks, and RoboSimStudio, an interactive toolkit that lets humans and coding agents rapidly build Real2Sim simulations of robot manipulation tasks — both in collaboration with NVIDIA.

My earlier work evaluates and trains vision-language models with robot data — RoboVista (RSS 2026) and Robo2VLM (NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight) — and builds cloud-robotics infrastructure with FogROS2, which ships as part of the official ROS 2 release. Previously, I was one of six core developers of SkyPilot, and spent summers at Bosch Research and VMware Research.

Agentic Robotics Robot Learning Simulation & Real2Sim Robot Data & Network Systems Distributed Robot Systems Vision-Language Models
02 · Education

Education

Ph.D. — UC BerkeleyComputer Science, 2020 – 2025
Advisors: John Kubiatowicz & Ken Goldberg
M.S. — UC BerkeleyComputer Science, 2024
B.S. — UCLAComputer Science, 2016 – 2020
Summa cum laude
03 · News

Recent News

  • Oct 2026🚀 Released RoboSimStudio, an interactive toolkit for human- and agent-driven Real2Sim of robot manipulation tasks, built on NVIDIA Newton — paper (arXiv:2610.18835), project page, and code.
  • Oct 2026Energy-Efficient Precision Weed Elimination Using a Quadruped Robot published in the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR).
  • Sep 2026🎉 GaP accepted to CoRL 2026 as a Spotlight (72 of 2,094 submissions, top 3.4%). See you in Austin, Nov 9–12.
  • Jul 2026🚀 Released GaP: Graph-as-Policy, in collaboration with NVIDIA — paper (arXiv:2607.05369), project page, code, and docs are live.
  • 2026RoboVista, evaluating vision-language models for diverse robot applications, accepted to RSS 2026.
  • 2026RoboSQ, semantic queries for task-aligned robot training data, accepted to ICRA 2026.
Older news
  • 2026RoboSegNet, multi-task robot trajectory segmentation from visual and kinematic streams, accepted to CVPR 2026 (Findings).
  • 2026HarborMaster, rollback detection for trusted distributed computing, accepted to VLDB 2026.
  • Sep 2025Robo2VLM accepted as a Spotlight (56 of 1,995) at the NeurIPS 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks track.
  • Sep 2025Gave an invited talk at the Berkeley Humanoid Intelligence Center and was interviewed for IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine's “Mastering Research” series.
  • May 2025🏆 Robo-DM won the Best Robot Learning Paper Award at ICRA 2025 (1 of 4,250 submissions), and my mentees won the Undergraduate Research Award at ICRA 2025 Art in Robotics.
  • May 2025🎓 Received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and stayed on as a postdoctoral scholar with Prof. Ken Goldberg.
  • Jan 2025Joined SkyPilot (Berkeley Sky Computing Lab) as one of six core developers, through May 2025.
  • Oct 2024FogROS2-FT named Best Paper Finalist and Best Student Paper Finalist at IROS 2024 (4 of 3,344 submissions).
  • 2023–25Won Google–BAIR Commons research proposals three years in a row (top ~10%).
04 · Research Spotlight

Agentic Robotics: RoboSimStudio & Graph-as-Policy

New · Oct 2026 Preprint · arXiv:2610.18835

RoboSimStudio: An Interactive Toolkit for Human and Agent Rapid Real2Sim of Robot Manipulation Tasks

Kaiyuan Chen*, Shuangyu Xie*, Uksang Yoo, Xinyue Zhu, Cael Magner, Alvin Zhu, Daehwa Kim, Eric Heiden, Erwin Coumans, Miles Macklin, Spencer Huang, Ken Goldberg  (*equal contribution)

CoRL 2026 Spotlight · top 3.4% (72 of 2,094)

GaP: A Graph-as-Policy Multi-Agent Self-Learning Harness for Variational Automation Tasks

Kaiyuan Chen*, Shuangyu Xie*, Letian Fu, Justin Yu, William Pacini, Sandeep Bajamahal, Hudson Kim, Jaimyn Drake, Daehwa Kim, Haoru Xue, Jonathan Francis, Christian Juette, Peter Schaldenbrand, Muhammet Yunus Seker, Ruwan Wickramarachchi, Uksang Yoo, Guanzhi Wang, Adithyavairavan Murali, Balakumar Sundaralingam, S. Shankar Sastry, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Spencer Huang, Ken Goldberg  (*equal contribution)

05 · Publications

Publications

* denotes equal contribution · full record on Google Scholar

Preprints & Under Review

Conference & Journal

Workshop papers & abstracts (9)
  • 2025
    Robo2VLM: Visual Question Answering from Large-Scale In-the-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasets
    Kaiyuan Chen*, Shuangyu Xie*, Zehan Ma, Pannag Sanketi, Ken Goldberg · RSS Workshop on Learned Robot Representations (RoboReps)
  • 2025
    Generative AI and Minimalist SculptureUndergraduate Research Award
    Kavish Kondap, Andy Bass, Elle O. Hill, Paloma Raffle, Andrew Goldberg, Tianshuang Qiu, Zehan Ma, Letian Fu, Justin Kerr, Huang Huang, Kaiyuan Chen, Kuan Fang, Ken Goldberg · ICRA Art in Robotics Special Session
  • 2024
    Robo-DM: Efficient Robot Big Data Management
    Kaiyuan Chen, Letian Fu, Siyuan Fu, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Huang Huang, Kush Hari, Ashwin Balakrishna, Pannag R. Sanketi, John Kubiatowicz, Ken Goldberg · CoRL Open X-Embodiment Workshop
  • 2024
    Blox-Net: Generative Design-for-Robot-Assembly Using VLM Supervision, Physics Simulation, and a Robot with Reset
    Andrew Goldberg, Kavish Kondap, Tianshuang Qiu, Zehan Ma, Letian Fu, Justin Kerr, Huang Huang, Kaiyuan Chen, Kuan Fang, Ken Goldberg · CoRL Workshop on Learning Robotic Assembly of Industrial and Everyday Objects
  • 2024
    RoboDM: Cloud-Based Large-Scale Data Collection
    Kaiyuan Chen, Kush Hari, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Ken Goldberg · IROS Workshop on Collecting, Managing and Utilizing Data Through Embodied Robots
  • 2024
    Fog-RT-X: Cloud-Based Large-Scale Collection and Management Framework
    Kaiyuan Chen · ICRA Open X-Embodiment Workshop
  • 2023
    Paranoid Stateful Lambdas
    Alex Thomas, Shubham Mishra, Kaiyuan Chen, John Kubiatowicz · SOSP
  • 2019
    Intelligent Wi-Fi Multicast for NDN AR
    Jinghao Zhao, Kaiyuan Chen, Zengwen Yuan, Songwu Lu · ICN WEN Workshop
  • 2019
    Classification of Large-Scale Lyme Disease Data
    Kaiyuan Chen, Rong Huang, Diyi Liu, Catherine Wahlenmayer, Jiewen Wang, Deanna Needell · Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM)
06 · Recognition

Honors & Awards

🏆

Best Robot Learning Paper Award, ICRA 2025

As first author · 1 of 4,250 submissions (Robo-DM)

🥇

Best Paper & Best Student Paper Finalist, IROS 2024

As first author · 4 of 3,344 submissions (FogROS2-FT)

🎤

Spotlight, CoRL 2026

As first author · 72 of 2,094 submissions, top 3.4% (GaP)

✨

Spotlight, NeurIPS 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks

56 of 1,995 submissions (Robo2VLM)

🎨

Undergraduate Student Research Award, ICRA 2025 Art in Robotics

With my undergraduate mentees

💡

Google–BAIR Commons Winner, 2023 · 2024 · 2025

Winning research proposals three consecutive years (top ~10%)

📝

Outstanding Reviewer, CVPR 2026

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

🎓

Summa Cum Laude, UCLA Computer Science

Highest Latin honor (top 1%) · Dean's List

07 · Experience

Experience

  • Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley AUTOLab / BAIR, with Prof. Ken Goldberg — robot data infrastructure & robot learning systems May 2025 – present
  • Core Developer, SkyPilot One of six core developers of the inter-cloud brokerage platform from the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab Jan – May 2025
  • Research Intern, Bosch Research Reliable cloud-robotics infrastructure on FogROS2 — led to adoptions, patents, and publications · with Dr. Nan Tian & Christian Juette Summers 2023, 2024
  • Research Intern, VMware Research Certifier: a cryptographic certification protocol and framework for heterogeneous secure enclaves · with Dr. John Manferdelli Summer 2022
  • Founding Engineer, MobIQ With Prof. Yuanjie Li and Prof. Songwu Lu 2018 – 2020
  • Research Engineer, Siemens Gaussian-mixture time-series anomaly detection for industrial sensors Summer 2017
08 · Speaking

Invited Talks & Media

  • Sep 2025Towards Scalable Data Infrastructure for Humanoid Intelligence — Berkeley Humanoid Intelligence Center
  • Sep 2025Interviewee, "Mastering Research — Part 1/3: Choose Smart, Read Smarter!" — IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine
  • Jun 2025Augmenting Open X-Embodiment Datasets — Google DeepMind–BAIR Commons
  • May 2025FogROS: A Cloud Robotics System — General Robotics
  • Feb 2025Cloud Robotics for Automation and Driving — Bosch Research
  • Jun 2024Cloud Robotics: Past, Present and Future — Berkeley Sky Seminar
  • May 2024FogROS2-SGC: Secure Global Connectivity — Berkeley Sky Retreat
  • Jan 2024Fog-RT-X: Cloud-Based Large-Scale Collection and Management — Google DeepMind
  • Aug 2023FogROS2: A Cloud Robotics Framework — Autodesk
  • Aug 2023Cloud Robotics and FogROS2 — ROS-by-the-Bay, Open Robotics
09 · Community

Teaching & Service

Teaching

  • Lead organizer, ICRA 2024 tutorial
    Cloud and Fog Robotics: A Hands-On Tutorial with ROS 2 and FogROS2
  • Graduate Student Instructor
    IEOR 115: Industrial and Commercial Data Systems (Fall 2024)
  • Mentor
    CS 262: Advanced Operating Systems (Fall 2020, Fall 2025)
  • Master's capstone advisor
    CMU MCDS, co-advised with Prof. Jeffrey Ichnowski (Fall 2023) · Berkeley MEng (Spring 2022)

Academic Service

  • Session Chair
    Multi-Robot Systems, ICRA 2025
  • Journal reviewer
    IEEE T-RO · IEEE RA-L · IEEE Transactions on Robot Learning (T-RL) · IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine · IEEE JSAC · IEEE Internet of Things Journal
  • Conference reviewer
    ICRA 2023–2027 · IROS 2022, 2024–2026 · CASE 2024–2025 · CoRL 2026 · RSS 2026 · NeurIPS 2026 · CVPR 2026 (Outstanding Reviewer) · ECCV 2026 · ICCV 2025