Allen Z. Ren     任至意

Ph.D. Student Intelligent Robot Motion (IRoM) Lab Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Princeton University Advisor: Prof. Anirudha Majumdar Email: allen.ren@princeton.edu

My research interests lie in improving generalization performance and safety of agile robotic systems under rich sensing
and allowing their fast adaptation in new, potentially out-of-distribution tasks and environments. I am particularly
excited to leverage algorithmic and theoretical tools from machine learning, optimization, optimal control theory, and
3D modeling to tackle robotic tasks including contact-rich manipulation, legged robot navigation, and drone maneuvering in wind.

Ph.D. Research

Sim-to-Lab-to-Real: Safe Reinforcement Learning with Shielding and Generalization Guarantees Kai-Chieh Hsu^, Allen Z. Ren^, Duy Phuong Nguyen, Jaime F. Fisac, and Anirudha Majumdar ^Equal contribution in alphabetical order Under Review

Distributionally Robust Policy Learning via Adversarial Environment Generation Allen Z. Ren, Anirudha Majumdar IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2022 Arxiv | IEEE | Code | Video

Stronger Generalization Guarantees for Robot Learning by Combining Generative Models and Real-World Data Abhinav Agarwal, Sushant Veer, Allen Z. Ren, and Anirudha Majumdar Under review, 2021 Arxiv

Generalization Guarantees for Imitation Learning Allen Z. Ren, Sushant Veer, Anirudha Majumdar Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2020 Arxiv | Code | Experiment Video | 5min Presentation

Education

• Ph.D. Student in Mechanical Engineering, Princeton University, 2019-Present

• M.S.E. Robotics, Johns Hopkins University, 2018-2019

• B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Minor in Mathematics, Johns Hopkins University, 2015-2019
  Advisor: Prof. Chen Li

Undergraduate Research

• Built insect-inspired legged robots and investigated general principles of terrestrial locomotion through robophysical experiments APS 2018, BB 2019

• Developed a proprioceptive contact-detection leg observer for Minitaur robot and applied it to disturbance and touchdown detection during stair climbing, with Prof. Aaron Johnson RISS 2018

• Built a “smart” guitar that measures forces applied by the fingers at 72 locations on the fretboard IEEE Sensor 2019, More details

Service

• Co-organizer, Princeton Robotics Seminar

• Webmaster, Robotics at Princeton

About Me

I was born in Jiangsu, China and grew up there until 16 when I continued high school in the U.S. I can speak Mandarin, English, and Wu fluently.
I enjoy watching and playing soccer, hitting the gym, and traveling/backpacking. I am also an aviation enthusiast and hold a private pilot license.
As much as I want to use my legal first name, Zhiyi, I find it very difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers