Zelin Shen

Student at UMich Robotics | Agile Robot Control and Design Lab

Zelin Shen kneeling behind a wheel-legged robot

Hi, I’m Zelin 👋 I’m a master’s student in the Robotics Department at the University of Michigan, where I work on legged and humanoid robots as a research assistant in the Agile Robot Control and Design (ARCaD) Lab, advised by Prof. Yanran Ding.

Before UMich, I was at Virginia Tech, where I earned my B.S. in Mathematics and B.S. in Computational Modeling & Data Analytics. During my undergraduate studies, I spent four years building competition robots with RoboGrinder, VT’s RoboMaster team, first as an embedded software developer and later as the lead of its ECE & embedded control branch. I like building robots end to end, from mechanical hardware and embedded firmware, through control, to higher-level applications.

News

Aug 25, 2025 Started my M.S. in Robotics at the University of Michigan.

Publications

  1. arcadian_robot.png arcadian_locomotion.gif arcadian_box.gif
    Arcadian: Open-Source Humanoid Ecosystem for Accessible and Customizable Research and Education
    Zelin Shen, Gabriel Ramos Salinas, Qiyu Zhang, Yue Qin, Chen Qian, and Yanran Ding
    Under review at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2027 ICRA
    Paper · coming soon arXiv · coming soon Website · coming soon Video Documentation
    Ongoing: V2 with new features is in progress.
  2. pedipulation_scoot.jpg pedipulation_scooting.gif pedipulation_underdesk.gif
    Mobile Pedipulation for Object Sliding via Hierarchical Control on a Wheeled Bipedal Robot
    Yue Qin, Yulun Zhuang, Zelin Shen, and Yanran Ding
    Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026 RA-L
    Paper arXiv Website Video
  3. surge_mups.jpg surge_hopping.gif surge_landscape.png
    SurGE: Surrogate Gradient-guided Evolution for Co-design of Legged Robots with Parallel Elasticity
    Yulun Zhuang, Yue Qin, Justin Lu, Zelin Shen, Yichen Wang, Sicheng He, and Yanran Ding
    Accepted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026 IROS
    Paper arXiv Website Video

Selected Projects

  1. Wheel-Legged Balancing Robot preview 1 Wheel-Legged Balancing Robot preview 2 Wheel-Legged Balancing Robot preview 3
    Wheel-Legged Balancing Robot
    A five-bar wheel-legged balancing robot built in 2024 and 2025, balanced by a gain-scheduled LQR. All of the control code runs on an STM32 microcontroller.
    Project Page
  2. Collinear Mecanum-Drive Balancing Robot preview 1 Collinear Mecanum-Drive Balancing Robot preview 2 Collinear Mecanum-Drive Balancing Robot preview 3
    Collinear Mecanum-Drive Balancing Robot
    A four-wheeled balancing robot on collinear mecanum wheels, built in 2023. Balance, forward driving, and lateral driving are handled by PID control on the onboard STM32 microcontroller.
    Project Page
  3. Four-Wheel Mobile Robot Platform preview 1 Four-Wheel Mobile Robot Platform preview 2
    Four-Wheel Mobile Robot Platform
    A common four-wheel omnidirectional mobile robot platform with a 2-DoF gimbal, developed continuously from 2021 to 2025. Chassis and gimbal were both iterated into different robots for different mobile tasks.
    Project Page