ZaidMahboob

Roboticist PhD student, Iowa State University

I make humanoid robots perform dynamic, accurate motions.

Open to work and collaboration on enhancing robots' capabilities. Get in touch

Ames, Iowa

What I work on

Enabling new capabilities for robots.

Whether humanoids or manipulators, I take robots past what they can do today, on real hardware.

I'm a Computer Science PhD student at Iowa State University.

I start from the model. Model-based control lets me reason about the torque and timing behind every motion. Now I'm moving toward learning-based capabilities for robots.

Focus

Dynamic motions for humanoid robots

Fast, accurate, dynamic whole-body motion.

Humanoids 2026 · Accepted

Tight Spiral Project

Making a humanoid robot throw a tight-spiral American football.

Unitree G1
Motion capture
Model-based control and optimization

93.6%: spin efficiency
5.35 m/s: release speed
14.5 rad/s: spin rate

See the project and video →

Hardware

Access to a robotics suite

Legged robots, manipulators, and the compute and tracking behind them. Live 3D: drag to turn.

Unitree H1-2Humanoid

UR10eIndustrial arm

SO-101Teleop arms

Jetson ThorOnboard compute

RTX 5090Training GPU

OptiTrackMotion capture

Experience

A Y Combinator startup and applied AI research, before robotics.

Cowlar YC W17

AI Engineer → Associate Product Manager · 2025

Computer vision and AI for manufacturing automation

Built computer vision and AI systems for manufacturing automation.
Deployed them at scale with TensorRT-optimized models on multi-PC Docker Swarm clusters.
Built a real-time voice agent end to end.
Built GAN-based synthetic data generation pipelines.
Moved into product as an Associate Product Manager.

University of Calgary

AI Research Intern · 2024 · Calgary, Canada

Generative and explainable AI for medical imaging

Selected as the only mechatronics engineer from Pakistan for this on-site internship.
Built explainable retinal-disease detection with 93% accuracy.
Built latent flow-matching generative models on a Stable Diffusion 2 VAE with MONAI.
Published a paper at SPIE Medical Imaging 2025.

PhD, Computer Science: Iowa State University, 2025 to present. GPA 4.00.
B.S. Mechatronics Engineering: NUST. CGPA 3.88, ranked 2nd of 100+. Gold and silver medals.
Earlier: Research and AI intern, NCRA, 2023.