Hi there!

I’m a MechE PhD student with the Perceptual Science Group at MIT CSAIL. I’m advised by Professor Edward H. Adelson. Before joining MIT, I worked at Nuro Inc. as a full-time software engineer on autonomous vehicle behavior (planning & maneuvers), for a year.

I received my M.S. degree in Robotics from The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was advised by Professor Oliver Kroemer at the Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation (IAM) lab.

My research interest mainly lies in robotic manipulation and robot learning. In particular, I’m interested in designing tactile sensors and using them to devise manipulation policies. Over the past few years, I have been working on reducing uncertainties for robotic assembly tasks by learning precise and task-oriented grasps, and learning contact-rich manipulation tasks by composing hierarchical controllers.

Before joining CMU, I spent one year as an undergrad researcher at UC Berkeley HART Lab. I worked on modeling and designing controllers for an active Upper Limb Exoskeleton under the supervision of Professor Ruzena Bajcsy.

In my spare time, I enjoy software and hardware robotics DIY. I’m working hard on releasing them and making them open source. Recently, I’ve started filming some of my DIYs. Please check out my Youtube channel Crafted by JZ or my BiliBili channel 试作间. Check out the #open-source section for released projects.

For update to date information, please checkout my homepage: https://alanz.info/, and google scholar.