Yunda Yan | Personal Page

Associate Professor

yunda[dot]yan[at]ucl.ac.uk

SMIEEE, FHEA, RAICo Fellow

I am currently an Associate Professor in Robotics and AI in the Department of Computer Science at UCL. Before joining UCL, I was a Senior Lecturer in Control Engineering at De Montfort University (2022–2023) and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Loughborough University (2020–2022). I received both my Bachelor’s degree (2009) and PhD (2019) in Control Science and Engineering from Southeast University. During my doctoral studies, I also held visiting research positions in aerial robotics at Loughborough University (2017–2018) and in biorobotics at the National University of Singapore (2016–2017).

My research lies at the intersection of control engineering, optimisation, and machine learning, under the theme of Control, Optimisation, and Learning for Autonomy (COLA). I am particularly interested in model predictive control, safety-critical control, disturbance rejection, and estimation for autonomous systems. My work focuses on developing theoretically grounded and computationally efficient methods for control and learning under disturbances, uncertainties, and constraints, with applications in robotics, intelligent transportation, and energy systems. I have authored or co-authored papers in leading journals and conferences, including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. For the most up-to-date citation metrics, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.

📌 PhD & Visiting Opportunities

If your background and interests align with my research in COLA, I would be happy to hear from you. I am always interested in working with motivated PhD students and academic visitors. Prospective applicants are encouraged to complete this form prior to contacting me. Funding opportunities, including scholarships, may be available for outstanding candidates. More details can be found on the UCL PhD programme page.

News

Welcomed Mr Chenxi Tao (Southeast University), Mr Peng Liu (Southeast University) and Mr Jingxin Huang (Nanjing Agricultural University) as visiting PhD students for a one-year appointment.
Awarded the Best Application Paper Award at ICAC 2026 for our paper “Perception Delay-Aware Predictive Visual Servoing for Quadruped Robot Person Following”.
Promoted to Associate Professor in Robotics and AI.
Welcomed Mr Zhenyu Gao as a PhD student.
Welcomed Dr Zuo Wang (Southeast University) as a visiting researcher for a one-year appointment.
Welcomed Mr Hao Chen (Tianjin University) and Mr Pengfei Xie (Southeast University) as visiting PhD students for a one-year appointment.
Welcomed Dr Pengfeng Lin (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) as a visiting researcher.
Elected as an IEEE Senior Member.
Awarded Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Appointed as Deputy Programme Director for the MEng Robotics and AI (RAI) programme.
Joined UCL as a Lecturer in Robotics and AI.