Experience
Builds
Skills

Yanda (Luke) Lu

19 | Mechanical Engineering Student, UT Austin

lukelupvp@gmail.com

Yanda (Luke) Lu

I'm a mechanical engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, currently founding a stealth robotics startup, alongside robotics research through the UT Center for Autonomy.

Selected builds and the full project gallery are below, with my full work history at the bottom.

Previously, I built the forearm and hand linkage for a humanoid arm at YouiBot in Shenzhen. I also led a VEX Robotics team to win the 2024 World Championship, and won hardware awards at multiple hackathons with 1,000+ competitors, including UC Berkeley AI and Texas Venture Group.

Robotics is the next platform shift, and whoever makes hardware and data collection radically cheaper wins it.

Along the way I've designed 20+ robots and built a robotics education community of 14,000+ members. (I'm a native speaker of English and Mandarin.)

Experience

Engineer

Stealth Startup June 2026 - September 2026

Hardware and robotics engineering at an early-stage stealth startup — details under NDA

Intern

Tess Ventures March 2026 - June 2026

Sourced and evaluated deep tech and robotics startups for early-stage investment

Founder in Residence

Founders Inc. 2026 - Present

Building Inhabit, a robotics teleoperation hardware company, backed by Founders Inc. and NVIDIA Inception

Mechanical Engineer Co-op

Paradigm Robotics December 2025 - February 2026

Robotics hardware design and rapid prototyping as a mechanical engineering co-op

Robotics Researcher

UT Center for Autonomy, Austin August 2025 - Present

Designed a 6-DOF humanoid arm and unified test bench (HopeJr + SO101) for autonomous manipulation research

UT Autonomy video thumbnail

25K views

Mechanical Engineer

YouiBot, Shenzhen June 2025 - July 2025

Led design of a humanoid robot arm and forearm in SolidWorks — production CAD on tight deadlines with electrical and controls teams

YouiBot video thumbnail

100K+ views

Founder, CEO, Consultant

Robocoaching, Online August 2021 - Present

Built the Robolytics coaching brand — 11,000+ members, 2M+ views, paid mentorship with top-tier robotics teams

Robotics Team Leader

VEX Robotics, Dallas May 2021 - July 2025

2024 World Champion, U.S. Open Champion, Skills World Record Holder — 30+ awards, 20+ robots designed in Inventor

Publications + Builds

CAST STEM Team 003 Poster - Audio Driven Talking Face

Audio Driven Talking Face

Led and presented 1st place-winning research on improving audio-driven facial animation using FLAME and BEAT models at UT Dallas CAST.

AI/ML Research Python
Glasses from the Future

Glasses from the Future (This Shouldn't Exist)

Built a floating display glasses prototype from scratch in 24 hours.

Hardware Rapid Prototyping

20K views

Laser Pen to Draw on Walls

I Built a Laser Pen to Draw on Walls

Designed and built a laser pen that draws on any surface using light projection.

Hardware Laser CAD

10K views

Won the UC Berkeley AI Hackathon 1 week ago
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Tools & Tech