John  Z.  Zhang 

profile_pic_2023.jpg

1723 Murray Avenue,

Pittsburgh, PA, 15217

I am a first‑year Ph.D. student in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Zac Manchester. I’m broadly interested in modeling and decision-making for robotic systems through the lens of numerical optimization and machine learning. I previously completed my M.S. in Robotics from the same lab in 2024 working on legged robots. Here is my thesis and presentation.

Prior to joining CMU, I received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2022, where I worked with Ye Zhao and Matthew Gombolay.

email / cv / github / google scholar / linkedin / x

selected publications

  1. quadruped_handstand.gif
    Whole-Body Model-Predictive Control of Legged Robots with MuJoCo
    John Z. Zhang, Taylor A. Howell, Zeji Yi, Chaoyi Pan, Guanya Shi, Guannan Qu, Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa, and Zachary Manchester
    2025
    arXiv PDF Website
  2. mppi.png
    Real-Time Whole-Body Control of Legged Robots with Model-Predictive Path Integral Control
    Juan Alvarez-Padilla, John Z. Zhang, Sofia Kwok, John M. Dolan, and Zachary Manchester
    In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2025
    arXiv PDF Website
  3. push_recovery_cropped.gif
    ReLU-QP: A GPU-Accelerated Quadratic Programming Solver for Model-Predictive Control
    Arun L. Bishop*, John Z. Zhang*, Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Kevin Tracy, and Zachary Manchester
    In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (*equal contribution), 2024
    PDF Code Video
  4. dog_reach_compiled.gif
    SLoMo: A General System for Legged Robot Motion Imitation from Casual Videos
    John Z. Zhang, Shuo Yang, Gengshan Yang, Arun Bishop, Swaminathan Gurumurthy, Deva Ramanan, and Zachary Manchester
    In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023
    PDF Code Website Video