When Tianyu Li, a doctoral student in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), and George Jiayuan Gao, former master’s student in Robotics and current research engineer at Dyna, set out to study how robots might better interact with the physical world, they weren’t just thinking about smarter machines, they were thinking about tools.
“Humans don’t just rely on their bodies to solve problems,” Li explains. “We design tools to use.”
That simple idea sits at the core of a new research project from Li and Gao with their advisors, Nadia Figueroa, Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in MEAM, and Dinesh Jayaraman, Assistant Professor in Computer and Information Science. The full research team also includes Junyao Shi, doctoral student in CIS, Yihan Li and Zizhe Zhang, both master’s students in Robotics through the ROBO Program, jointly sponsored by CIS, Electrical Systems Engineering (ESE) and MEAM. Presented by Li at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, the team’s project, VLMgineer, is a framework that uses artificial intelligence not just to “think,” but to design, adapt and deploy tools in the real world.
