I am a member of Motional's planning team, focusing
on
developing theL4self-driving system.
Before joining the AV industry, I earned my Computer
Science
PhD from the University of New Hampshire in December
2021. My research focused on AI
meta-reasoning, which involves teaching AI agents
to decide how deeply to think before making
rational decisions in
uncertain situations.
During my PhD, I was
a member of the UNH Artificial Intelligence
Group, where I worked with Professor
Wheeler Ruml in the area of
Meta-reasoning,
Bounded-Suboptimal Heuristic Search, Real-time
Heuristic
Search, Robot Task Planning and Robot Motion
Planning.
I have been a senior software engineer and expansion team
tech lead in the planning group under Autonomy at
Motional
since Jan 2023. In our
team, we work on
solving autonomy expansion problems to help
our robotics solution grow safely at scale. Through our
innovative
ODD-aware Routing solution, the L4 AV fleets can expand rapidly,
enabling
them to operate in new neighborhoods, new cities and
even new countries.
I worked as a software engineer Ⅱ in the motion planning
team at Argo
AI in 2022 until its sudden shut-down. Our team
design, build, test and deploy a
safety-critical
trajectory generator for L4 autonomous vehicles.
Developed an action desirability classifier for AV
behavior planning using a hybrid approach that combines
rule-based and learning-based techniques.
University of New Hampshire RA, TA | 6
years
I was a research assistant at the UNH AI Group. I
conduct theoretical and empirical research
projects to design principled algorithms for
autonomous agents to plan in an uncertain
environment under time pressure. My works
have been published in several AI conferences such as
AAAI, IJCAI, ICAPS, and IROS. Please see the publication
session below for more details.
I was also a teaching assistant at the
University of New Hampshire for a variety of
courses, involved in creating assignments and exams and
conducting recitation sessions for Algorithms (C), Intro
to
AI, Intro to Computer Science (Java, Python), Intro to
Software Engineering (DevOps tools), Intro to Computer
Security, Database Programming (C#, SQL), Scripting
Languages (bash, zsh). Here are some teaching samples.
Cognitive Assistive Robotics Lab Summer
Research Intern
| 3 months
I was a robotics intern at CARL
at UNH in the
summer of 2019. I worked on a proof-of-concept research
project that builds a socially assistive robot to support
the caregiving of individuals with Alzheimer's disease. In
the project, I
Build a smart-home-based service robot framework that
can provide real-time Alzheimer's disease care.
Build an AI planner based on ROSPlan that performs
real-time online task planning.
Here
is a video that shows two caregiving scenarios:
1) the robot reminds the patient to take medication,
2) the robot is preventing a dangerous walkaway of the
patient. The second part of the video record a
group of real-world caregivers participating in our user
study.
I also demoed the system to a group of
undergrads.
All of the source codes are here.
Two papers are published from this project: a robotics
paper
and a gerontology
paper.
Here
is my talk at ICAPS and
slides. Based on our prototype
robot,
CARL successfully raised a $2.8 Million NIH grant. The
robot will be deployed to 15 homes in the near future.
Realtime Robotics
Summer Research Intern | 3 months
I was a robotics intern at Realtime Robotics in the
summer of 2018. I worked on a motion planning project
that could enable an autonomous vehicle to safely drive in
crowded urban areas and also achieve the goal regions as
quickly as possible. In the project, I
Build a real-time planner for an autonomous vehicle
that can safely drive in a crowded urban area.
The planner was lattice-based and performed an anytime
search.
Build a real-time planning framework that enables
handling a dynamic world online.
Build a simulation environment to demonstrate flagship
products to significant new customers.
Here
is a video shows the vehicle avoids hitting a man who
rushed into the road. Here
is another video that shows that the car obeys the
traffic
light. It also visualizes the online lattice is also.
Here
is my talk about this project and slides.
Port of Shanghai
Software
Engineer | 3 years
I worked as an operations research engineer and a
software
engineer at the Shanghai International Port Group
for three years (2012-2015) after I graduated
from the Shanghai
Maritime University with my Master's Degree in
Logistics Engineering. While I was at the SIPG, I worked
on
the following projects:
Member of the team that designed, built and deployed
a new automated container terminal operations management
system, including algorithm development for the crane
allocation and scheduling module and the financial
module.
I worked as a software engineer intern at Alcatel-Lucent (Shanghai)
during the
summer of 2011. While
there, I developed a global electrical elements database,
including web interfaces and database maintenance
software.
Peer-reviewed Publications
Maximilian Fickert*, Tianyi Gu*, and Wheeler
Ruml,
New Results in Bounded-Suboptimal Search.
Proceedings of the Thirty-sixth AAAI Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-22), 2022.
Tianyi Gu, Wheeler Ruml, Shahaf Shperberg, Eyal
Shlomo
Shimony, and Erez Karpas, When to Commit to an Action in
Online Planning and Search.
Proceedings of the Symposium on Combinatorial Search
(SoCS-22), 2022.
Maximilian Fickert*, Tianyi Gu*, and Wheeler
Ruml,
Bounded-Cost Search Using Estimates of Uncertainty.
Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IJCAI-21), 2021.
Tianyi Gu,
Distributional Metareasoning for Heuristic Search.
Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21),
2021.
Maximilian Fickert*, Tianyi Gu*, Leonhard Staut*,
Sai Lekyang,
Wheeler Ruml, Joerg Hoffmann, and Marek Petrik,
Real-time Planning as Data-driven Decision-making.
Proceedings of the ICAPS Workshop on Bridging the
Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning
(PRL-20), 2020.
Tianyi Gu, Momotaz Begum, Naiqian Zhang, Dongpeng
Xu, Sajay Arthanat, and Dain
P. LaRoche, An Adaptive Software Framework for
Dementia-care Robots.
Proceedings of the ICAPS Workshop on Planning and
Robotics (PlanRob-20), 2020.
Maximilian Fickert*, Tianyi Gu*, Leonhard Staut*,
Wheeler Ruml, Joerg Hoffmann, and Marek Petrik, Beliefs
We Can Believe In: Replacing Assumptions with Data in
Real-Time Search. Proceedings of the Thirty-fourth
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI-20), 2020.
Sajay Arthanat, Momotaz Begum, Tianyi Gu, Dain
P. LaRoche, Dongpeng Xu, and Naiqian Zhang, Caregiver
Perspectives on A Smart Home-based Socially Assistive
Robot for Individuals with Alzheimer's Disease and
Related Dementia. Disability and Rehabilitation:
Assistive Technology, 2020.
Bence Cserna, William J. Doyle, Tianyi Gu, and
Wheeler Ruml,
Safe Temporal Planning for Urban Driving,
Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence Safety (SafeAI-19), 2019.
Reazul H. Russel, Tianyi Gu, and Marek Petrik,
Robust Exploration with Tight Bayesian Plausibility
Sets,
Proceedings of the 4th Multidisciplinary
Conference on Reinforcement Learning and
Decision Making (RLDM), 2019.
Scott Kiesel, Tianyi Gu, and Wheeler Ruml,
An Effort Bias for Sampling-based Motion Planning,
Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017.
Yi Ding, Xujun Wei, Yang Yang, and Tianyi Gu,
Decision Support-based Automatic Container Sequencing
System Using Heuristic Rules, Cluster
Computing 20(1) 239-252, 2017.
Chengji Liang, Miaomiao Li, Bo Lu, Tianyi Gu,
Jungbok Jo, and Yi Ding, Dynamic Configuration of QC
Allocating Problem Based on Multi-objective Genetic
Algorithm, Journal of Intelligent
Manufacturing 28(3) 847-855, 2017.
Chengji Liang, Tianyi Gu, Bo Lu, and Yi Ding,
Genetic Mechanism-based Coupling Algorithm for Solving
Coordinated Scheduling Problems of Yard Systems in
Container Terminals,
Computers & Industrial Engineering 89 34–42,
2015.
Yi Ding, Tianyi Gu, Guolong Lin, and Chengji
Liang,
The Establishment and Solution of Coupling Model on
Coordinated Scheduling of Handling Facilities in
Container Terminals,
Applied Mathematics & Information Sciences 6(3)
915–924, 2012.
