Made in NYC
I’m Jerry (Qilong) Cheng, a Robotics Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto building the next generation of Embodied Intelligence — machines that move, sense, and think. I work with Prof. Jonathan Kelly in the STARS Lab (UTIAS), and began my Ph.D. at New York University with Prof. Ludovic Righetti (Machines in Motion). My mission is to engineer generalized, highly articulate robots for the home—vertically integrated systems designed to automate daily tasks, save us time, and seamlessly enrich our lives.
Research Vision
“We are born too late to explore the Earth and too early to explore the stars — but just in time to solve AI and robotics.” — Jim Fan
Robotics is nearing the scaling inflection that reshaped language and vision — and the binding constraint is large-scale, diverse action data, not new methods. I build one full-stack pipeline aimed at that bottleneck, connecting hardware co-design, learning from human video, and real-world reinforcement learning — toward general-purpose robots for the home.
“Those who are truly serious about software should design their own hardware.” — Steve Jobs
