Samuel Zapolsky
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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SeniorSamuel Zapolsky is an applied scientist and robotics leader with 13 years of experience building high-performance hardware and software for dynamic, contact-rich manipulation and locomotion. He combines full-stack expertise—from actuator and structural design through real-time control, perception, and planning—to deliver robust, production-ready robotic systems and to lead multidisciplinary teams. His background spans research roles at Toyota Research Institute and hands-on leadership as CTO of Dextrous Robotics, now continuing at RAI Institute in New York. Samuel’s PhD work centered on diagnosing and preventing robot failures, a thread that informs his practical approach to designing systems that tolerate real-world contact and friction variability. Notably comfortable moving between simulation-driven insight and physical-system tradeoffs, he excels at translating research into reliable, fieldable robots.
13 years of coding experience
Github Skills (35)
robotics10
verification10
drake10
dynamics8
simulation8
simulator8
physics7
c-library7
cpp6
entropy5
ros5
vector5
collision5
matrix5
algebra5
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
PositronicsLab/Pacer
Jul 2014 - Jan 2017
Contributions:461 commits, 288 pushes, 14 branches in 2 years 7 months
PositronicsLab/idyn-experiments
Oct 2014 - Mar 2016
Contributions:5 commits, 3 pushes in 1 year 5 months
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