A short tenure ends
Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence learned that Ding Yan, co-CTO of Luming Robot, has formally left. His social profile now reads researcher at Fudan University’s Zuquan Institute, confirming the career turn. From joining in November 2025 to leaving, his time at Luming was under 280 days.
As one of the earliest core drivers of the UMI (imitation learning without an embodied body) route, Ding carries high influence in embodied-data circles. He holds a computer-science PhD from SUNY, and worked on robot perception and control at Ford and Meta. He was among the first to fuse large models into robot control.
After returning to China in 2024, he served as a young researcher at the Shanghai AI Lab, where he led several VLA models, and as co-founder and CTO of Yixing Robot. After Yixing dissolved amid investor retrenchment, he brought a dozen core engineers to Luming to build the UMI data system and the embodied-model training stack.
What leaves with him
Luming’s FastUMI and FastUMI Pro systems, through hardware and algorithm innovation, raised data-collection efficiency fivefold and cut cost 80 percent, breaking the industry’s “high quality, low cost, large scale” impossibility triangle. Ding now joins Fudan’s Zuquan Institute, the university’s core platform for turning research into industry, focused on brain-inspired and embodied intelligence across perception, control and trusted AI.
The company is Luming Robot Technology (Shenzhen).
Editor’s note: This article is based on reporting by Gasgoo. Read the original in Chinese here: https://www.gasgoo.com/apps/50640d4b55d5cba175fb84f15d679f19/robot/news/70468949.