About

EXPERIENCES

Tesla               Palo Alto CA, USA

Robotics Engineer               Aug 2024 – Present

• Optimus Hand Design for Grasping and Manipulation

• Tactile Sensing

Robotics Engineer Intern                      Jun 2023 – Jan 2024

• Tesla bot/Optimus Hand tactile skin early-stage development and integration

• Robotic grasping and manipulation in factory tasks

• Hand structure design

Sensing Engineer Intern                Feb 2023 – Jun 2023

• Electronics Design/Firmware Development for Tactile Sensor Prototyping

• FMCW Radar & TPMS Failure Analysis

National University of Singapore (NUS)               Singapore, SG

Project Leader and Ph.D. Research Student             Aug 2019 – Present

• Founded a novel biomimetic tactile sensor, GTac, to give robots the human sense of touch, using piezoresistive and magnetic sensing principles and mimicking human skin-like multilayer structure.

• Integrated the GTac sensors into robotic multi-fingered hands, GTac-Hand and GTac-Gripper, such that the fingers and palm can acquire rich tactile feedback including distributed normal and shear forces sensing. 

• Proposed an algorithm for contact-rich manipulation task using deep learning such that the robotic hand can learn and perform human-like skills, such as tasks of grasping delicate object and handover.

• Collaborated with four diverse research groups in areas of robotic learning, tactile robots, material science and rehabilitation exoskeleton; Mentored and teamwork with master and FYP students.

Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR)                               Singapore, SG

Ph.D. Research Intern     Aug 2022 – Jan 2023

• Developed an algorithm for estimating robotic swab testing contact angle using machine learning models and designed systematic experimental validation of several supervised learning models.

• Improved the tactile sensor design and integrated the sensor into robotic gripper such that the robot can acquire rich tactile feedback during the swab testing and collaborated on journal paper writing. 

National University of Singapore (NUS)           Singapore, SG

Research Intern, Department of Biomedical Engineering                 Sep 2018 – Jan 2019

• Developed a human gait locomotion recognition algorithm for exoskeleton using supervised learning model and the accelerometer and gyroscope feedback from five IMUs mounted on human lower limb. This work has been published and presented in a top conference (IROS 2020).

Johns Hopkins University (JHU)                                Baltimore MD, USA

Research Intern, Department of Mechanical Engineering                 Jun 2018 – Aug 2018

• Initiated a computer vision algorithm locating mosquito features, to facilitate vaccine production, Deep learning (Mask R-CNN) and Clustering & Hough transform using TensorFlow and OpenCV. 

Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)                           Shenzhen, CHN

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Department of Mechanical Engineering       Feb 2018 – Apr 2019

• Improvised a passive ankle-knee coupling wearable assistive exoskeleton of lower-limbs.

• Developed a simplified passive suspended backpack that can reduce the metabolic cost by about 5% during loaded walking. This work was patented (CHIN, No. CN210841945U).

Tsinghua University             Beijing, CHN

Research Intern, Department of Mechanical Engineering                 Jul 2017 – Aug 2017

• Optimized the mechanical design of a knee actuation box of soft assistive exoskeleton using Inventor.

University of British Columbia (UBC)                                     Vancouver, CAN

Summer Exchange, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering                 Jul 2016 – Aug 2016

• Obtained 4 credits from two modules related to Electrical and Computer Engineering.

PUBLICATIONS

Journals

Z. Lu and H. Yu, "GTac-Hand: A Robotic Hand With Integrated Tactile Sensing and Extrinsic Contact Sensing Capabilities," in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Apr 2023, doi: 10.1109/TMECH.2023.3264650. [link][video]

H. Zhang*, Z. Lu*, W. Liang, H. Yu, Y. Mao and Y. Wu, "Interaction Control for Tool Manipulation on Deformable Objects Using Tactile Feedback," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 2700-2707, May 2023, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2023.3257680. [*equal contributions]

Zeyu Lu, Haotian Guo, Wensi Zhang and Haoyong Yu, "GTac-Gripper: A Reconfigurable Under-Actuated Four-Fingered Robotic Gripper With Tactile Sensing," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2022, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3181370. [link][video]

Zeyu Lu, Xingyu Gao, and Haoyong Yu, "GTac: A Biomimetic Tactile Sensor with Skin-like Heterogeneous Force Feedback for Robots," in IEEE Sensors Journal, 2022, doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2022.3181128. [link][video]

Zhang, Kuangen, Jianwen Luo, Wentao Xiao, Wen Zhang, Haiyuan Liu, Jiale Zhu, Zeyu Lu, Yiming Rong, Clarence W. de Silva, and Chenglong Fu. 2021. “A Subvision System for Enhancing the Environmental Adaptability of the Powered Transfemoral Prosthesis.” IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics 51 (6): 3285–97. [link]

Leng, Yuquan, Xin Lin, Zeyu Lu, Aiguo Song, Zhangguo Yu, and Chenglong Fu. 2020. “A Model to Predict Ground Reaction Force for Elastically-Suspended Backpacks.” Gait & Posture 82 (October): 118–25. [link]

H. H. Cheng, T. M. Kwok, Z. Lu and H. Yu, "GTac-SE: A Low-Density Intention Sensing for Forearm Exoskeleton With Shear Force Sensors," in IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 2963-2977, 15 Jan.15, 2025, doi: 10.1109/JSEN.2024.3496904

Conferences

Zeyu Lu, Haotian Guo, Wensi Zhang, and Haoyong Yu, "GTac-Gripper: A Reconfigurable Under-Actuated Four-Fingered Robotic Gripper With Tactile Sensing," in 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oct. 2022. [link]

Zeyu Lu, Ashwin Narayan, and Haoyong Yu. 2020. “A Deep Learning Based End-to-End Locomotion Mode Detection Method for Lower Limb Wearable Robot Control.” In 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 4091–97. [link] [video]

Patents

 Z. Lu, H. Yu. “A Method of Tactile Force Sensing – GTac”, Int., WO2023277794, Jan 2023.

Z. Lu, Y. Leng, J. Li, X. Lin, C. Fu, "A Backpack" CN110051106B, Feb 2023.

C. Fu, Y. Leng, Z. Lu, et al. “A Suspended Backpack”, CN210841945U, Sep 2019.

Peer-Reviewed Workshops:

Z. Lu, et al., “GTac: A Biomimetic Tactile Sensor with Skin-like Heterogeneous Force Feedback for Robots,” RoboTac Workshop at IROS2022, Kyoto Japan, Oct 2022.

Z. Lu, et al., “GTac-Gripper: A Reconfigurable Under-Actuated Four-Fingered Robotic Gripper with Tactile Sensing,” RoboTac Workshop at IROS2022, Kyoto Japan, Oct 2022.

Z. Lu, et al, “GTac-Hand: A Robotic Hand with Integrated Biomimetic Tactile Sensing and ECS Recognition Capabilities,” RoMaDO-SI Workshop at IROS2022, Kyoto Japan, Oct 2022.

Teaching

Co-Facilitator of Respect and Consent Workshop

Academic Sevices

Reviewer:

• IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics

• Frontiers in Neurorobotics

• IEEE ICRA 2023

• IEEE ICRA 2024

• IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

• IEEE IECON 2023

• IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering

• IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics

• CISRAM24

• 27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems