Denglin Cheng

First-year Ph.D., University of Michigan · Department of Robotics · ARCaD Lab

about.sh

whoami

Denglin Cheng — Ph.D. @ Michigan Robotics (ARCaD Lab)

Studying humanoid systems

research --focus

whole-body control · Sim2Real · Data Generation · Physical Simulation

research --tools

Optimization · Control · Contact Smoothing · Imitation Learning

I am advised by Prof. Yanran Ding in the ARCaD Lab. Prior to that, I earned an M.S. in Robotics from Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I am interested in humanoid systems: the algorithms and their implementation, and in understanding the internals well enough to extend them.

News

Publications & Preprints

* denotes equal contribution.

  1. ICRA

    Simultaneous Calibration of Noise Covariance and Kinematics for State Estimation of Legged Robots via Bi-level Optimization

    Denglin Cheng*, Jiarong Kang*, Xiaobin Xiong

    Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026

    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{cheng2026legged_bilevel_calibration,
      title = {Simultaneous Calibration of Noise Covariance and Kinematics for State Estimation of Legged Robots via Bi-level Optimization},
      author = {Cheng, Denglin and Kang, Jiarong and Xiong, Xiaobin},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
      year = {2026},
      eprint = {2510.11539},
      archiveprefix = {arXiv},
      primaryclass = {cs.RO},
    }

Teaching

  • Spring 2026
    CS663 Algorithms for Sensor-Based Robotics Topics Course tutor, Johns Hopkins University
  • Fall 2025
    ME646 Robot Devices, Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control Topics: MLS Ch.2-4 Teaching assistant, Johns Hopkins University