Hongrui Yu

Role and Background

Dr. Hongrui Yu serves as the Assistant Professor for Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Vecellio Construction Engineering and Management Program. She joined Virginia Tech in 2024.

Dr. Yu's research focuses on human-robot symbiotic construction that enables human and artificial intelligence to co-handle complex, dexterous, and long-horizon construction tasks interactively and collaboratively. In her current research, Hongrui is exploring human skillful manipulation and socially aware behavior imitation for construction robots using multimodal sensorimotor interactions, reinforcement learning, generative machine learning algorithms, digital twin, virtual reality, and cloud robotics. She aims to impact the future construction workflow and future workforce through her human-centric and ethical robotics research. 

Previously, Hongrui served as a Ph.D. Researcher for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan before joining the Virginia Tech.

Education

Dr. Hongrui holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and an M.S. in Robotics, both from the University of Michigan, and an M.S. in Civil Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.