Denglin Cheng

About Me

I am a Master’s student in Robotics (MSE) at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Jin-Seob Kim. Before that, I completed my bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Zhejiang University.

During Summer of 2025, I was fortunate to work as a research assistant at the WELL Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with Prof. Xiaobin Xiong and Jiarong Kang on legged-robot state estimation and calibration.

Research Interests

• Contact and friction modeling, especially formulations ranging from complementarity and hybrid models to convex, differentiable, and smoothed relaxations.
• Numerical methods for nonsmooth contact problems, with emphasis on derivative information, as well as constraint qualification, violation, and relaxation.
• Integrations of reasoning-based and learning-based methods, especially where dynamically consistent trajectories can serve as useful priors or supervision for data-driven approaches.