Zilin Si

PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University

zsi[at]andrew[dot]cmu[dot]edu

Hello there! I am Zilin, a final-year PhD candidate 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

A multi-modal tactile fingertip design for robotic hands to enhance dexterous manipulation, 2025,

Zhuowei Xu , Zilin Si , Kevin Zhang , Oliver Kroemer , Zeynep Temel

pdf website

ExoStart: Efficient learning for dexterous manipulation with sensorized exoskeleton demonstrations, 2025,

Z Si* , JE Chen* , ME Karagozler* , A Bronars , J Hutchinson , T Lampe , N Gileadi , T Howell , S Saliceti , L Barczyk , IO Correa , T Erez , M Shridhar , MF Martins , K Bousmalis , N Heess , F Nori , M Bauza

pdf website

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

pdf website

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

code pdf website

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

code pdf website

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

media pdf video website

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

code pdf video website

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

code media pdf video website

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

code pdf video website

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

code pdf video website

Taxim: An Example-based Simulation Model for GelSight Tactile Sensors, 2022, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) with ICRA

Zilin Si , Wenzhen Yuan

code pdf video website

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

pdf video website

Maximal Information Propagation with Budgets, 2020, European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)

Haomin Shi , Yao Zhang , Zilin Si , Letong Wang , Dengji Zhao

pdf

Degeneracy Detection for RGB-D Odometry, 2019, Robotics Institute Summer Scholars Working Papers Journal

Zilin Si , Ming Hsiao , Michael Kaess

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