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Zilin Si
PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University
zsi[at]andrew[dot]cmu[dot]edu

Hello there! I am Zilin, a third-year PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I am co-advised by Prof. Zeynep Temel and Prof. Oliver Kroemer, and I am part of both the Zoom lab and the IAM lab. My research focuses on developing robotic hands and learning systems for dexterous manipulation. I am also passionate about designing and deploying tactile sensors on multi-finger hands to advance manipulation.

Recently, I completed a student researcher internship with Google DeepMind in London. Before that, I spent a summer of 2023 as a research intern working with Dr. Chuang Gan at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

I earned my Master’s degree in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where I had a great time working in the RoboTouch Lab (now affiliated with UIUC), advised by Prof. Wenzhen Yuan. My research there focused on example-based tactile simulation and its sim-to-real applications.

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at ShanghaiTech University. As an undergraduate researcher, I worked with Prof. Laurent Kneip in Mobile Perception Lab; I also interned with Robot Perception Lab as part of the RISS program, advised by Prof. Michael Kaess.

Outside of work, I love dancing ballet, rock climbing, and spending time with my cat, Bobo.

Interests

  • Dexterous Manipulation
  • Robotic Hand Design
  • Tactile Sensing

Academia

Carnegie Mellon University
2022 - present
Ph.D. Robotics
RI Presidential Fellowship (2023-2024)
Carnegie Mellon University
2020 - 2022
M.S. Robotics
ShanghaiTech University
2016 - 2020
B.Eng. Computer Science
Graduated with honor!

Publications

Tilde: Teleoperation for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation Learning with a DeltaHand, 2024, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)
Zilin Si* , Kevin Zhang* , Zeynep Temel , Oliver Kroemer
DIFFTACTILE: A Physics-based Differentiable Tactile Simulator for Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation, 2024, The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
Zilin Si* , Gu Zhang* , Qingwei Ben* , Branden Romero , Zhou Xian , Chao Liu , Chuang Gan
DELTAHANDS: A Synergistic Dexterous Hand Framework Based on Delta Robots, 2023, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Zilin Si , Kevin Zhang , Oliver Kroemer , F. Zeynep Temel
RobotSweater: Scalable, Generalizable, and Customizable Machine-Knitted Tactile Skins for Robots, 2023, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Zilin Si* , Tianhong Catherine Yu* , Katrene Morozov , James McCann , Wenzhen Yuan
MidasTouch: Monte-Carlo inference over distributions across sliding, 2022, The Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)
Sudharshan Suresh , Zilin Si , Stuart Anderson , Michael Kaess , Mustafa Mukadam
Grasp Stability Prediction with Sim-to-Real Transfer from Tactile Sensing, 2022, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Zilin Si , Zirui Zhu , Arpit Agarwal , Stuart Anderson , Wenzhen Yuan
ObjectFolder 2.0: A Multisensory Object Dataset for Sim2Real Transfer, 2022, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Ruohan Gao* , Zilin Si* , Yen-Yu Chang* , Samuel Clarke , Jeannette Bohg , Li Fei-Fei , Wenzhen Yuan , Jiajun Wu
Efficient shape mapping through dense touch and vision, 2022, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Sudharshan Suresh* , Zilin Si* , Joshua G. Mangelson , Wenzhen Yuan , Michael Kaess
Taxim: An Example-based Simulation Model for GelSight Tactile Sensors, 2022, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) with ICRA
Zilin Si , Wenzhen Yuan
Improving Grasp Stability with Rotation Measurement from Tactile Sensing, 2021, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Raj Kolamuri* , Zilin Si* , Yufan Zhang , Arpit Agarwal , Wenzhen Yuan
Maximal Information Propagation with Budgets, 2020, European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)
Haomin Shi , Yao Zhang , Zilin Si , Letong Wang , Dengji Zhao
Degeneracy Detection for RGB-D Odometry, 2019, Robotics Institute Summer Scholars Working Papers Journal
Zilin Si , Ming Hsiao , Michael Kaess