Robotics · Sensing · Learning

Zilang Chen

M.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
University of Pennsylvania

I work across tactile sensing, deep learning, and robotic systems. My experience spans data collection, model training and evaluation, hardware prototyping, and efficient LLM inference.

I want to build robots that use sensory feedback to manipulate more reliably, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from mistakes.

Research Interests

Tactile ManipulationLearning to manipulate with tactile feedback.

Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Robot SkillsLearning motion and manipulation skills for changing conditions.

Selected Research

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IROS 2026 · Accepted · Second author

Zero-Shot Deformation Reconstruction for Soft Robots

Estimating a soft robot’s changing shape from a flexible sensor array, without camera input during inference.

Physical specimenRender · frontRender · back
The same motion, captured and reconstructed in sync. 20 s · silent

My work. Sensor acquisition software, experimental data collection, geometric preprocessing, model training, and evaluation.

4.7° bending / 4.9° twisting mean angle error · reported in the paper

Sensor-to-cage reconstruction pipeline
Sensor measurements become cage motion and reconstructed geometry. Click to enlarge.

Less storage for the KV cache

73.4%reduction vs. FP16 (approx.)

FP16
100%
INT4
26.6%
Across four representative configurations. KV-cache storage, not total GPU memory.

Undergraduate thesis · Independent research

Behavior-Guided KV-Cache Quantization

Reducing LLM inference storage while preserving attention behavior and long-context retrieval.

My work. Independently developed the calibration, quantized cache, Triton decoding kernels, and evaluation pipeline.

Role-aware calibration for keys and values · evaluated across six instruction models

Building Robotic Systems

From sensing to working prototypes
Two SCUT robots developed for ROBOCON 2023

ROBOCON 2023

Robot fabrication and mechanism assembly. National Third Prize with the SCUT team.

Recent Publications

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Outside the lab

Places & moments.

A photographic journal, near and far.

Explore photography
Green island ridges surrounding a blue bay dotted with boats.