Huaiyuan Rao

Huaiyuan (Joe) Rao 饶怀远

I'm currently a second-year Ph.D student in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Institute of Technology (2025-Present) advised by Prof. Matthew Hale. Prior to this, I received my Master degree in ECE from Georgia Tech (2022-2024) and B.Eng. degree in Automation from East China Jiaotong University (2018-2022). I've spent time at CUHK(SZ) Robotics & AI Lab (2023).

Research

My research interests lie primarily in Differential Privacy, Robotics, Control, Machine Learning and Optimization. (* indicates equal contribution)

	Generating Differentially Private Networks with a Modified Erdős-Rényi Model Huaiyuan Rao, Calvin Hawkins, Alexander Benvenuti, Matthew Hale American Control Conference (ACC), Accepted, 2026
	Synergizing Reinforcement Learning and Classic Control: Optimized Policy Search for Continuum Robots Guanglin JI, Huaiyuan Rao, Qian Gao, Cheng Qian, Wenhao Li, Xiaoqiang Ji, Zhenglong Sun IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), 2025
	Dynamic Hysteresis Compensation for Tendon-Sheath Mechanism in Flexible Surgical Robots without Distal Perception Qian Gao, Guanglin Ji, Minyi Sun, Yin Xiao, Huaiyuan Rao, Zhenglong Sun IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2025
	Predicting Chaotic System Behavior using Machine Learning Techniques Huaiyuan Rao, Yichen Zhao, Hsuan-Pin Chen Nonlinear Science and Control Engineering, 2025

Projects
	Defend The Republic Drone Competition BuzzBlimps, 2024, Advisor: Matthew Hale Video GitHub This work mainly deploys custom yolov5 model on rk3588 series NPU using multithreading, which run a yolov5 model in 120 fps on OrangePi. And using ROS2 to rossify entire detecting framework and integrate with blimp’s position and rotation control part.
	Low Visibility Weather Radar Assisted Driving System Intelligent Driving Team, 2020-2022, Advisor: Yun Yang Video This work develops the vehicle detection algorithm on the AWR1843-BOOST (Texas Instruments) platform, designed to operate in harsh environments. This system will provide drivers with the distance and angle to the car ahead in real-time.
	ECE7785: Introduction to Robotic Research Course Project, 2024 Spring Video Here is our collection of assignments for the ECE 7785 Introduction to Robotics Research course. These labs showcase fundamental robotics concepts such as Image Classification, Controllers, State Estimation, Navigation, and Mapping using the Turtlebot3 Burger platform.
	Stanford CS234: Reinforcement Learning Course Project, 2024 Summer GitHub Here are CS234 assignments done by myself, which contains the foundamental codes of Policy/Value Iteration, PPO, DPO and RLHF.