Junzhe Hu

PhD Student @ MIT
MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)
Bio-inspired Robotics Computational Design Physical AI FSI Adaptive Control

About Me

I am a PhD student at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) , advised by Prof. Daniela Rus. Previously, I completed my M.S. in Robotics at the Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute , where I was co-advised by Prof. Carmel Majidi and Prof. Zachary Manchester.

My research focuses on embodied intelligence for robotic systems operating in complex environments. I develop bio-inspired robots, differentiable physics-based models, and adaptive control and learning methods to study how morphology, physcial properties, and distributed sensing can be co-designed to produce intelligent behavior. I am particularly interested in aquatic and field robotics, fluid-robot interaction, and the role of body intelligence in shaping autonomy.

News

  • 2026.01 Paper on Realizing Robotic Swimming with Strongly-Coupled Fluid-Robot Multiphysics submitted to RSS 2026.
  • 2026.01 Paper on Spatiotemporal Stiffness Modulation accepted at npj Robotics!
  • 2025.10 Two workshop papers presented at CoRL 2025 β€” SwimGym and Unified Multiphysics.
  • 2025.07 Paper on Aerial-Aquatic Robot accepted at IROS 2025 (Oral).
  • 2025.06 Workshop paper on Unified Multiphysics Framework published at ICRA 2025 Workshop.
  • 2025.05 Paper on Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation under reviewed in IEEE T-MI.
  • 2024.08 Joined CMU Robotics Institute as a graduate research assistant.
  • 2024.05 Won Best Capstone Project Award (1/130).
  • 2023.11 Awarded Chinese Government National Scholarship (top 0.8%).
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Selected Publications

Full List β†’
Spatiotemporal Stiffness Modulation for Efficient Aquatic Robot Locomotion Accepted
J. Hu, J. Lee, T. Wu, G. Sue, J. Liao, Z. Erickson, Z. Manchester, C. Majidi
npj Robotics, 2026
Realizing Robotic Swimming with Strongly-Coupled Fluid-Robot Multiphysics Under Review
J. Hu*, J. H. Lee*, C. Majidi, Z. Manchester
RSS 2026 (Under Review)
Vortex-Induced Propulsion in Upstream Robotic Swimming Under Review
J. H. Lee*, J. Hu*, S. Kazi, M. Luhar, C. Majidi, Z. Manchester
PNAS (Under Review)
⏳ Under Review
A Novel Aerial-Aquatic Locomotion Robot with Variable Stiffness Propulsion Module Published
J. Hu, P. Chen, T. Feng, Y. Wen, K. Wu, J. Dong
IEEE IROS 2025 (Oral)
Expanding and Rectifying Pseudo-Label Perturbation Space for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Published
J. Hu, Y. Wen, E. Roussinova, M. Bouri
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging, 2025