TIANYU·LI

I am currently an MSc student in Robotics & Intelligent Systems at Nanyang Technological University. Prior to joining NTU, I studied at the University of Liverpool, where I worked as a Research Assistant at the Smart Robotic Lab under the supervision of Prof. Anh Nguyen. I graduated from the University of Liverpool with First Class Honours.

Research Interests

  • Vision-Language-Action Models
  • Imitation Learning
  • Robotic Grasping
  • Sim-to-Real
  • Data Collection
  • Robot Datasets

News

  • 2026.06.29

    Honored to graduate from the University of Liverpool with First Class Honours.

  • 2026.06.18

    Our paper, Gripper-aware Vision-Language-Action Models, was accepted to ECCV 2026.

  • 2026.06.17

    Our paper, GCA-Bench, was accepted to IROS 2026.

Education

Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

MSc, Robotics & Intelligent Systems

From Aug 2026

University of Liverpool

BSc, Computer Science with Software Development
First Class Honours (Top 10%)

2023 — 2026

Research Experience

Smart Robotic Lab, University of Liverpool

Research Assistant · supervised by Prof. Anh Nguyen

Aug 2025 — Jun 2026

Hesai Technology

Embodied AI Industry Research Intern

Jul 2024 — Sep 2024

Publications

ECCV 2026
ECCV 2026To appear

Gripper-aware Vision-Language-Action Models

Hanyi Zhang, Zihong Luo, Tianyu Li, Khang Nguyen, Basu Hela, Shreyas Kumar, Ngoc Duy Tran, Feng Dai, Khoa Vo, Ngan Le, Shigeru Chiba, Ravi Prakash, Tung D. Ta, Anh Nguyen, Baoru Huang

We introduce MiGA, a dataset of 103,000 demonstrations across five gripper types, and GVLA, a gripper-conditioned VLA framework combining multi-gripper tokenization with a dual Mixture-of-Adapters. Experiments in simulation and on real robots demonstrate improved gripper-aware strategy learning, generalization, and cross-gripper transfer.

GCA-Bench overview IROS 2026
IROS 2026To appear

GCA-Bench: Beyond Visual Grasping — Benchmarking Complex Grasping from Detection to Execution

Hanyi Zhang, Khang Nguyen, Charith Munasinghe, Basu Hela, Tianyu Li, Zihong Luo, Hoan Nguyen, Hans Wernher van de Venn, Yalin Zheng, Ravi Prakash, Tung D. Ta, Anh Nguyen, Baoru Huang

GCA-Bench evaluates robotic grasping as an end-to-end process requiring semantic reasoning, scene understanding, and trajectory-level execution. It comprises 102 tasks across singulated, cluttered, constrained-space, and semantic scenarios, with simulation and real-world demonstrations for evaluating grasping pipelines and VLA models.

Projects

Autonomous Frontier Explorer mapping timelapse Webots
Robotics Project97.6% Map Coverage

Autonomous Frontier Explorer

An autonomous exploration and occupancy-grid mapping system for a Pioneer 3-DX robot in Webots. It combines Bayesian log-odds mapping, dynamic frontier selection, hybrid Bug navigation with PD wall following, and recovery behaviours for loops, collisions, timeouts, and stalled motion.

Hobbies

Outside of research, I am an avid sports enthusiast and a confident player in basketball, tennis, badminton, and table tennis.

Basketball
Tennis
Badminton
Table Tennis