Zhonghe (Catherine) Zheng

IROM Lab — Princeton University

Advisor: Prof. Anirudha Majumdar

• Surveying action-conditioned video world models with an emphasis on controllability, long-horizon prediction, and retention of pretrained visual knowledge
• Developing a novel action-conditioned world model architecture to improve controllability while mitigating catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning
• Fine-tuned robot policies within a world model trained on autonomously collected play trajectories and conducted real-world hardware validation experiments

Autonomous Robotics and Control Lab — Caltech

PI: Prof. Soon-Jo Chung · Mentor: Sorina Lupu

• Worked on a custom biped platform exploring imitation learning and reinforcement learning for energy-efficient locomotion
• Trained PPO-based locomotion policies in Isaac Lab for energy-efficient bipedal walking

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Research Intern

Mentor: Dr. Ashish Goel

• Validated the novel hazard avoidance algorithm Optimization Based Kinematic Settling (OBKS) for the Endurance mission
• Developed a scalable evaluation pipeline for validating hazard-avoidance algorithms across multiple simulated terrains
• Integrated OBKS into a state lattice planner and compared performance against the Nav2 planner

Autonomous Robotics and Control Lab — Research Intern

PI: Prof. Soon-Jo Chung · Mentors: Dr. Matt Anderson, Joshua Cho

• Led electrical integration for an autonomous drone car prototype
• Integrated emergency power systems and customized flight controller communication pipelines
• Conducted software testing and debugging while improving modularity and code reuse
• Experimented with 6-DoF controller for the platform

CHAOS — NASA Big Idea Challenge

• Contributed to brainstorming, technical development, and proposal writing