Zihan Chen
Director Of Research Development at Cornerstone Robotics
Redwood City, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolZihan Chen is a robotics and systems software leader with 13 years of experience building surgical and industrial robotic platforms from research prototypes to product-ready systems. Currently Director of Research Development at Cornerstone Robotics in Redwood City, he blends hands-on engineering with team leadership, having progressed from systems and controls roles at Intuitive Surgical, Verb Surgical, and Auris Health to management and director positions. He holds an MS and PhD in Robotics/Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and applies that academic depth to practical problems in kinematics, control, and software reliability. An active contributor to open-source robotics tooling, he improved Python bindings and modernized tests for the widely used Orocos Kinematics and Dynamics library, showing attention to cross-language compatibility and code quality. Colleagues rely on him to translate complex research algorithms into maintainable production code and to shepherd interdisciplinary teams through hard technical transitions.
13 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityBachelor of Engineering - BE, Bachelor of Engineering - BE at Zhejiang University
English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (7)
python-bindings10
kinematics10
python10
cprogramming-language9
robotics9
c-language9
unit-testing8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
orocos/orocos_kinematics_dynamics
Jan 2018 - Feb 2020
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 commits, 13 PRs, 22 comments in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Zihan primarily contributed to the Python bindings for the Orocos Kinematics and Dynamics (KDL) library. Their work included fixing Python 3 compatibility issues in the `__repr__` method, ensuring correct string representation. They replaced tabs with spaces in test files and fixed deprecation warnings in the test code, demonstrating attention to code quality and Python best practices. Additionally, the user added getter functions for weights, optimal positions, and alpha, and added a ChainIdSolver python wrapper.
kinematicscppc-libraryc-plus-plusdynamics
zchen24/zchen24.github.io
Aug 2013 - Jul 2021
user pages
Contributions:63 commits, 3 PRs, 73 pushes in 7 years 11 months
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