About me

Hi, I’m Qian Wang, but I go by Peter! I am a PhD student advised by Daniel Rakita at Yale University. I completed my undergrad at the University of Southern California (USC) studying Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Applied Math.

I am broadly interested in robot planning (long-horizon, manipulation, and multi-agent), particularly building agents that mimic human decision-making and act like humans. My research focuses on scalable methods that enable robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks. So far, I have centered my research on developing better methods, both low-level search-based and high-level learning-based, to empower robots to accomplish fundamental and sophisticated tasks. Ultimately, I hope that robots and machines can be equipped with high-level cognitive skills to assist people in their daily lives and low-level motor skills to execute complex tasks effectively.

Research

I was fortunate to participate in several research projects in the past at USC. I did research with Maxim Likhachev at CMU and worked on 3D Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) and ML MAPF. I worked on DNN-MCTS parallelization under the supervision of Viktor Prasanna. I worked on enhancing human-robot interaction using the Task and Motion Planning framework with the advisement of Stefanos Nikolaidis at the ICAROS lab. I worked on the design and control of a lightweight low-cost quadruped robot under the mentorship of Quan Nyugen at the DRCL lab.

Publications

• APOLLO Toolbox: A Flexible, Multi-language Planning, Learning, and Optimization Software Suite
  Roshan Klein-Seetharaman, Richard Xue, Byron Li, Ryan Tsai, Blaze Goldstein, Chen Liang, Teeratham Vitchutripop, Qian Wang, Liam Merz Hoffmeister, Xiatao Sun, Daniel Rakita
  In Review

• iFlow: An Interactive Max-Flow/Min-Cut Algoritm Visualizer
  Muyang Ye, Tianrui Xia, Tianxin Zu, Qian Wang, David Kempe
  SIGCSE, 2025

• Improving Learnt Local MAPF Policies with Heuristic Search
  Rishi Veerapaneni*, Qian Wang*, Kevin Ren*, Arthur Jakobsson*, Jiaoyang Li, Maxim Likhachev.
  ICAPS, 2024

• MAPF in 3D Warehouses: Dataset and Analysis
  Qian Wang*, Rishi Veerapaneni*, Yu Wu, Jiaoyang Li, Maxim Likhachev.
  ICAPS, 2024

• Accelerating Deep Neural Network guided MCTS using Adaptive Parallelism
  Yuan Meng*, Qian Wang*, Tianxin Zu, Viktor Prasanna.
  13th Workshop on Irregular Applications: Architectures and Algorithms (IA^3, 2023)

• Enhancing the Performance of DeepReach on High-Dimensional Systems through Optimizing Activation Functions
  Qian Wang*, Tianhao Wu*.
  arXiv, 2023

Teaching Experience

• Spring 2023 - Spring 2024: Course Producer for CSCI 360: Intro to Artificial Intelligence with Prof. Mohammad Rajati
• Spring 2024: Course Producer for CSCI 102: Intro to Computing with Prof. Mohammad Rajati
• Spring 2023: Grader for EE451: Parallel and Distributed Computations with Prof. Viktor Prasanna
• Spring 2023: Lab Mentor for EE354: Intro to Digital Circuits with Prof. Gandhi Puvvada
• Fall 2022: Course Producer for EE 109: Intro to Embedded Systems with Prof. Mark Redekopp

Honors and Awards

• USC Provost’s Research Fellowship (Spring 2023)
• Center for Undergraduate Research in Viterbi Engineering (CURVE) Fellowship
• Dean’s list from Fall 2020 to Fall 2022
• Academic Achievement Award Spring 2021, Fall 2022

Contact

• Work-related: peter.wang.qw262 ‘at’ yale ‘dot’ edu
• Everything else: wangqian1207 ‘at’ gmail ‘dot’ com