Photo

Zhanpeng He

Google Scholar  /  GitHub  /  Twitter
Email: zhanpeng [at] cs.stanford.edu

Zhanpeng He

I am a postdoctoral scientist at Amazon Robotics, working with Professor Jiajun Wu. Before this, I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University, co-advised by Professor Matei Ciocarlie and Professor Shuran Song. I was a member of the Robotic Manipulation and Mobility (ROAM) Lab and the Columbia Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Lab (now REAL@Stanford).

Before joining CU, I received a master's degree from University of Southern California, where I worked as a research assistant at the Robotic Embedded System Laboratory (RESL) and advised by Professor Gaurav Sukhatme. When I am not working, I enjoy cooking, brewing coffee and playing with my dog Nova. Here is a picture of Nova being corrupted by Gaussian noises.

Research

I'm a full-stack roboticist -- I believe robotics must be solved through progress in many different integral components. While scaling up data collection is important, we also need to design the right hardware (e.g, manipulators and contact sensors) and learning algorithms (e.g., learning from imbalanced sensor data) to enable robust policies on real robots for contact-rich tasks. To this end, my research includes:

  • Policy learning (e.g., imitation learning, reinforcement learning) for contact-rich tasks;
  • Hardware design (e.g., manipulators, data collection systems, and contact sensors) and task-driven hardware optimization;
  • Learning from multi-sensor and imbalanced data;
  • Human-in-the-loop policy learning and deployment;

My full research statement will be available soon.

News

Publications (* - indicates equal contributions and joint-first authors)

SpikeATac
Eric T. Chang*, Peter Ballentine*, Zhanpeng He*, Do-gon Kim, Kai Jiang, Hua-Hsuan Liang, Joaquin Palacios, William Wang, Ioannis Kymissis, Matei Ciocarlie
Under review / Website / Paper / WSJ Coverage
MiniBEE
Sharfin Islam*, Zewen Chen*, Zhanpeng He*, Swapneel Bhatt, Andres Permuy, Brock Taylor, James Vickery, Zhengbin Lu, Cheng Zhang, Pedro Piacenza, Matei Ciocarlie
Under review / Website / Paper
Meta-World+
Reginald McLean, Evangelos Chatzaroulas, Luc McCutcheon, Frank Röder, Tianhe Yu, Zhanpeng He, KR Zentner, Ryan Julian, JK Terry, Isaac Woungang, Nariman Farsad, Pablo Samuel Castro
NeurIPS 2025 D&B / Paper
Spotlight at CODEML@ICML 2025
VibeCheck
Do-Gon Kim*, Kaidi Zhang*, Hua-Hsuan Liang, Eric T Chang, Zhanpeng He, Ioannis Kymissis, Matei Ciocarlie
IROS 2025 / Website / Paper
HULA
Siddharth Singi*, Zhanpeng He*, Alvin Pan, Sandip Patel, Gunnar A. Sigurdsson, Robinson Piramuthu, Shuran Song, Matei Ciocarlie
ICRA 2024 / Website / Paper
Pick2Place
Zhanpeng He, Nikhil Chavan-Dafle, Jinwook Huh, Shuran Song, Volkan Isler
ICRA 2023 / Paper

Service, Teaching, and Mentoring

Academic Services
  • Submission Chair: RSS 2026
  • I am a long-term (>= 4 years) reviewer for: CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, RA-L, TMECH, IJRR, and T-RO
Teaching Experience
  • Invited Lecturer: MECE 6616 Robot Learning 2024Spring, 2025Spring
  • Teaching Assistant: MECE 6616 E Robot Learning 2020Spring, 2022Spring
  • Teaching Assistant: CS111 Introduction to Computer Science
Current Mentees
Former Mentees
  • Yifeng Cao (MS EE → Ph.D at Virginia Tech)
  • Toby Kreiman (UG CS → Ph.D at UC Berkeley)
  • Andrew Liu (UG CS → AI intern at Flagship Pioneering)
  • Siddharth Singi (MS ME → ML Scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)
  • Alvin Pan (MS CS → AI Scientist at Faction Imaging Inc.)
  • Rohan James (MS CS → ML Engineer at AWS)

Software

I was a member of rlworkgroup and took part in development of several robot-learning-related open-source projects.

  • Garage: A toolkit for reproducible reinforcement learning research.
  • Dowel: A little logger for machine learning research.
  • Meta-World: A collection of environments for benchmarking meta-learning and multi-task reinforcement learning algorithms.