I'm Jingyi Zou (she/her), a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science working on tactile sensing and robot learning — building fingertip sensors, contact-rich manipulation datasets, and policies that use touch, from real hardware to simulation. My Ph.D. work built atomically thin synaptic devices for neuromorphic computing; now I'm teaching robots to feel.
Sim-to-real pipeline running end to end. GR00T N1.6 fine-tuned on Isaac Sim demos reaches 50% success in simulation from a cloud GPU; real-robot rollouts via a Raspberry Pi client expose the sim-to-real gap we're now closing.
XLeRobot build underway. The dual-arm mobile manipulator's wheel base is printed and assembled; arms, camera mast and fin-ray grippers are coming off the printer next.
Dual-Paxini recording unblocked. Extension cables validated — both 52-taxel fingertips now record in real time through the LeRobot stack.
MLXTAC released. A 70-episode contact-rich manipulation dataset pairing magnetic tactile sensing with RGB and proprioception, openly available on Hugging Face.
Tactile ACT ladder: first phases trained. Baseline and tactile-as-state ACT policies trained across three grasp tasks, with six checkpoints published on Hugging Face.
Gripper jaws v2. Both tactile jaws rebuilt from verified hardware geometry, cutting added fingertip bulk from ~28 mm to ~5 mm.
Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering (2025).
Advisor: Prof. Xu Zhang. Dissertation on atomically thin 2D synaptic
devices for power-efficient neuromorphic computing.
B.S., Physics — Condensed Matter Physics (2019).
MBE growth and characterization of monolayer TMD alloys in the MBE
Lab with Prof. Yi Zhang.
Spintronics at UCLA's Device Research Lab (CSST program, Prof. Kang L. Wang), X-ray optics at the Institute of High Energy Physics, and two semesters as TA for CMU's Memory Devices and Micro/Nano Systems Fabrication courses. Cleanroom-trained hands turn out to be good at building grippers.
SO-101 gripper jaws redesigned around commercial Hall-effect tactile sensors: a magnet-embedded TPU fingertip for the MLX90393 single-taxel sensor and dual 52-taxel Paxini fingertips, with real-time recording integrated into the LeRobot stack.
A contact-rich manipulation dataset pairing single-taxel magnetic tactile sensing with wrist and top RGB and proprioception — 70 episodes of grasping and pick-and-place, openly released.
Dataset ↗Measuring how touch improves manipulation policies by climbing a ladder of tactile integrations in ACT and Pi0.5 — from baseline to tactile-as-state to learned encoders — in a policy-agnostic fork of LeRobot.
Code ↗An end-to-end imitation-learning pipeline: Isaac Sim tasks and demos, GR00T fine-tuning on a cloud GPU, and deployment to a real SO-101 through a Raspberry Pi robot client — now working on closing the sim-to-real gap.
A low-cost dual-arm, mobile SO-101 platform with fin-ray grippers and VR teleoperation, built for bimanual, contact-rich data collection with tactile integration.
A custom fingertip PCB with sixteen taxels and a microphone channel sampling at ~130 Hz, designed for dense contact-event detection on low-cost grippers.
An interfacial-charge-based MoS2 synaptic transistor with ~105 analog switching ratio at ~50 pW programming power, plus a physics-based device simulator used as a physical reservoir — 92% on MNIST with a single device's dynamics.
Tunable pixelated graphene based thermal infrared emitter array and its electrothermal characterization
Y. Zhong, X. Liu, Z. Wang, J. Zou, T. Huang, S. Lin, et al. — Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 109817 (2026)
Electrically programmable pixelated coherent mid-infrared thermal emission
X. Liu, Y. Zhong, Z. Wang, T. Huang, S. Lin, J. Zou, et al. — Nature Communications 16, 1665 (2025)
Reconfigurable Integrated High-Speed Thermal Metamaterial Pixel Arrays
Y. Zhong, X. Liu, Z. Wang, T. Huang, J. Zou, S. Lin, et al. — Nano Letters 25 (33), 12712–12718 (2025)
Reconfigurable Ultrafast Thermal Metamaterial Pixel Arrays by Dual-Gate Graphene Transistors arXiv:2506.04372
Y. Zhong, X. Liu, Z. Wang, T. Huang, J. Zou, S. Lin, et al. — preprint (2025)
Power efficient MoS2 synaptic devices based on Maxwell–Wagner interfacial charging in binary oxides first author
J. Zou, S. Lin, T. Huang, H. Liu, Y. Liu, Y. Zhong, et al. — 2D Materials 11 (1), 015009 (2024)
Physical Vapor Deposition of High-Mobility P-Type Tellurium and Its Applications for Gate-Tunable van der Waals PN Photodiodes
T. Huang, S. Lin, J. Zou, Z. Wang, Y. Zhong, et al. — ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 17 (1), 1861–1868 (2024)
Artificial neuronal devices based on emerging materials: neuronal dynamics and applications
H. Liu, Y. Qin, H.-Y. Chen, J. Wu, J. Ma, Z. Du, N. Wang, J. Zou, et al. — Advanced Materials 35 (37), 2205047 (2023)
Circuit-level memory technologies and applications based on 2D materials
J. Ma, H. Liu, N. Yang, J. Zou, S. Lin, Y. Zhang, et al. — Advanced Materials 34 (48), 2202371 (2022)
Controlled growth of two-dimensional InAs single crystals via van der Waals epitaxy
J. Dai, T. Yang, Z. Jin, Y. Zhong, X. Hu, J. Zou, et al. — Nano Research 15 (11), 9954–9959 (2022)
Strongly surface state carrier-dependent spin–orbit torque in magnetic topological insulators
X. Che, Q. Pan, B. Vareskic, J. Zou, L. Pan, P. Zhang, et al. — Advanced Materials 32 (16), 1907661 (2020)
Band engineering in epitaxial monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides alloy MoxW1−xSe2 thin films
X. Xie, Y. Ding, J. Zong, W. Chen, J. Zou, et al. — Applied Physics Letters 116 (19) (2020)
Growth and Thermo-driven Crystalline Phase Transition of Metastable Monolayer 1T′-WSe2 Thin Film doi:10.1038/s41598-019-39238-7
W. Chen, X. Xie, J. Zong, T. Chen, D. Lin, F. Yu, S. Jin, L. Zhou, J. Zou, et al. — Scientific Reports 9, 2685 (2019)
Full list and citation metrics on Google Scholar.
The fastest way to reach me is email: jingyizou01@gmail.com, or find me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to talk about tactile sensing, robot learning, or low-cost robot hardware — and I'm currently open to postdoc and industry R&D opportunities.