Soe Wai Yan
ROBOTICS & COMPUTER VISION
I'm an MIT EECS student building perception and manipulation pipelines for real robots — vision-guided arms, autonomous racecars, and embedded sensing systems. I like taking a project from raw camera frames to a physical actuator moving in the real world.
“If it doesn't work on real hardware, it doesn't work.”
ABOUT
A bit about me
I'm an MIT EECS student building perception and manipulation pipelines for real robots — vision-guided arms, autonomous racecars, and embedded sensing systems. I like taking a project from raw camera frames to a physical actuator moving in the real world.
I'm studying B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating May 2028, with coursework spanning Introduction to Algorithms, Signal Processing, Electric Circuits, Introduction to C in Assembly, Robotics Science and Systems, Introduction to Autonomous Machines I & II.
EXPERIENCE
Where I've worked
- Trained vision-based manipulation policies (ACT, π0.5 vision-language-action model) to autonomously grasp objects with a real 7-DoF bimanual robot arm (AgileX Nero ALOHA) from 3-camera RGB input
- Collected 300+ teleoperated demonstrations and built the full data pipeline — raw HDF5 capture → normalization → LeRobot format → LoRA fine-tuning of π0.5 on dual RTX 4090 GPUs
- Deployed policies for real-time inference on an edge GPU (RTX 4060) and iteratively improved grasp performance through on-hardware debugging and policy tuning
PROJECTS
What I've built
JUNE 2026 – PRESENT
Autonomous Elevator-Button-Press System
An end-to-end vision-guided pipeline enabling a 7-DoF bimanual robot arm to autonomously locate and press elevator call buttons.
FEB 2026 – MARCH 2026
Autonomous Racecar Perception & Control
A full-stack perception, planning, and control system for a physical autonomous racecar, built with a team of 5.
SEPT 2025 – DEC 2025
Modular Robot Hardware — MIT CSAIL
Reconfigurable joint and linkage hardware for robot morphology optimization, designed and fabricated at CSAIL.
JUNE 2024 – MAY 2025
Autonomous Soil-Analysis System — Core Research Program
A calibrated multispectral sensing system for autonomous soil nutrient detection, co-authored as a research paper presented at NCUR 2025.
MORE
AUG 2024 – MAY 2025
School Bus Tracking App (BUSMATE)
An affordable IoT-based school bus tracking prototype, built with a team of 4 — 1st place, 2024 Perimeter College Innovative Challenge.
COURSEWORK
Robotics Science & Systems — Lab Highlights
Selected lab demos from MIT's Robotics Science & Systems course, covering control and autonomy on a physical racecar platform.
SKILLS
Tools I work with
Programming Languages
Robotics & ML
Hardware
Tools
CONTACT
Let's talk
Have an internship, research opportunity, or project in mind? I'm an email away.