Zhongyu Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, which he joined in 2025. He took a bachelor's degree in mechatronics engineering at Zhejiang University in 2019 and master's (2020) and doctoral (2025) degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a visiting student researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. His research aims at the next generation of dynamic robots — legged, humanoid and other bio-inspired machines — making them more intelligent, agile, robust and safe so that they become genuinely useful in real-world environments. The work has appeared in leading robotics journals including The International Journal of Robotics Research and IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and has been shortlisted for conference awards including best amusement paper at IROS 2020, best service robot paper at ICRA 2021 and best RoboCup paper at IROS 2022. In 2023 he was selected as an RSS Pioneer in robotics and as a rising star in mechanical engineering.
Li works on dynamic control for legged and humanoid robots, aiming to move them from laboratory demonstrations into real environments; his papers and award shortlists concentrate on agile locomotion and service robotics.
Achievements
- 2020 · Completed a master's degree in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley.
- 2023 · Selected as an RSS Pioneer in robotics and a rising star in mechanical engineering.
- 2025 · Completed his PhD at Berkeley and joined CUHK.