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About

Baiyu Shi is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of deformable object manipulation and surgical automation. His primary research areas include robotic manipulation of thin, flexible materials—such as plastic bags and fabric layers—and autonomous surgical assistance for critical procedures. Shi’s major contributions include developing the first automated pipeline for vascular shunt insertion using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), a fundamental trauma surgery task. His work "AutoBag: Learning to Open Plastic Bags and Insert Objects" (29 citations) addresses the notoriously difficult problem of handling specular, occluded, and dynamically deforming plastic bags, introducing a learning-based approach to bag opening. He also pioneered "Bagging by Learning to Singulate Layers Using Interactive Perception" (6 citations), which enables robots to separate fabric layers using only visual feedback and standard grippers. In surgical robotics, Shi’s "Automating Vascular Shunt Insertion with the dVRK Surgical Robot" (7 citations) and his trimodal framework for local, remote, or absent surgeon supervision (5 citations) represent significant steps toward autonomous trauma care. His work has direct applications in retail, healthcare, and field surgery, demonstrating how robotic systems can handle both everyday and life-saving tasks with increasing autonomy.