Yanda (Luke) Lu
20 | Robotics World Champion | Mechanical Engineering Student, UT Austin
Right now I'm running the robotics business at Bright Saver Industries.
Selected builds and the full project gallery are below, with my full work history at the bottom. The Pantheon visual below comes from its published research, with my contribution described separately.
Previously, I was a mechanical engineer at Pantheon Inc., a frontier robotics foundation-model lab in San Francisco, did robotics research at the UT Center for Autonomy, and 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.)
Projects
filter by all, industrial, wearables, competition, or hardware.
Experience
Run the robotics business and operations: work with Chinese robot makers in Mandarin to earn US Conditional Approvals and rebuild their production lines in the US with our manufacturing partners
Designed a deformable worm-gear end effector in Fusion 360 for a frontier robotics foundation-model lab, deployed it into the teleoperated data pipeline (1,000+ hours collected), and trained a policy on it in Isaac Sim that transferred sim-to-real at 90% pick-and-place success
Sourced and evaluated deep tech and robotics startups for early-stage investment
Built Inhabit, a robotics teleoperation hardware company, backed by Founders Inc. and NVIDIA Inception
Robotics hardware design and rapid prototyping as a mechanical engineering co-op
Robotics Researcher
UT Center for Autonomy, Austin August 2025 - 2026Designed a 6-DOF humanoid arm and unified test bench (HopeJr + SO101) for autonomous manipulation research
25K views
Mechanical Engineer
YouiBot, Shenzhen June 2025 - July 2025Led design of a humanoid robot arm and forearm in SolidWorks — production CAD on tight deadlines with electrical and controls teams
100K+ views
Founder, CEO, Consultant
Robocoaching, Online August 2021 - PresentBuilt 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 20252024 World Champion, U.S. Open Champion, Skills World Record Holder — 30+ awards, 20+ robots designed in Inventor
Publications + Builds
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.
Glasses from the Future (This Shouldn't Exist)
Built a floating display glasses prototype from scratch in 24 hours.
20K views
I Built a Laser Pen to Draw on Walls
Designed and built a laser pen that draws on any surface using light projection.
10K views