About me

Hi! I am currently a research assistant at the Fastlab (Fire) at Zhejiang University (ZJU), conducting research on mobile robots under the guidance of Yanjun Cao. I graduated this year from Nanjing Institute of Technology (NJIT) with a degree in Mechanical and Electronic Engineering. During my time at NJIT, I was part of the All-terrain Vehicle Lab, where I gained valuable experience in independently building robotic systems.

My primary research interests are motion planning and control for mobile robots. In the future, I plan to expand my focus to include legged robots or wheel-legged robots, as I believe wheel-legged robots are the most efficient configuration for navigating artificial environments.

I believe robotics should solve structural challenges beyond biological evolution—like combining wheels with multi-jointed legs, a structure evolution alone cannot achieve. Robotics can make this possible, allowing us to fully harness a robot's capabilities through autonomous control to perform tasks impossible for biological species or hazardous for humans. This vision fuels my passion for mobile robots, especially wheeled-legged designs.

I am deeply fascinated by robotics's future and committed to advancing research in this field. If you're interested in discussing my work or potential collaborations, email me.

Skills

Programing: C/C++, python, ROS, Git, LaTeX, Matlab
Design: Fusion 360, Recurdyn, Blender, Sloidworks, Altium Designer, 3D Printing, CNC
Microcontroller: Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, Stm32, Esp32, Arduino, OpenMv, K210
Video edit: Photoshop, Premier, After Effects

Publications

Efficient Trajectory Generation Based on Traversable Planes in 3D Complex Architectural Spaces (ICRA 2025)
Mengke Zhang^†, Zhihao Tian^†, Yaoguang Xia, Chao Xu, Fei Gao, Yanjun Cao

Novel design of Reconfigurable Tracked Robot with Geometry-Changing Tracks (IROS 2024)
Chice Xuan^†, Jiadong Lu,^† Zhihao Tian, Jiacheng Li, Mengke Zhang, Hanbin Xie, Jianxiong Qiu, Chao Xu, and Yanjun Cao
Paper | Video

Interesting projects

A split Bluetooth keyboard
Free your hands regardless of keyboard size（Not easy to use）
Origin project: Corne

A 5-DOF robotic arm mounted on a UAV
A robotic arm specially installed on the drone, driven by a servo, with a flexible gripper that can easily grab objects weighing 100g.
References: CHAT-PM
(The original author did not open source this robotic arm, but it is a very cool design, so I reversed their design based on the pictures in the paper.)

The first version of CubeTrack
I made this version of cubetrack with Zelong Xia, Chice Xuan, it has many flaws in hardware and program, but it is really cute and tiny, it only has a footprint of 50cm*40cm, but it can climb stairs at a speed of 1m/s, and then the system crashed...
New version cubetrack's website: CUBETRACK

HoloCubic:Transparent display desktop station
The first hardware project completed during my college, it uses a beam splitter prism to achieve the effect of pseudo-holographic projection. It can display the time and weather in real time, or play animations.What's interesting is that it switches functions by changing the posture of the desktop.
Origin project: HoloCubic

Balance Car
Equipped with imu to obtain the status of the balance car, maintain balance through pid control, and can use a smartphone to control movement via Bluetooth