About Me

I am a master student of Robotics Department at University of Michigan (UMich), where I work on underwater robot digital twin with professor Katherine Skinner. Prior to that, I received my bachelor of science degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), double majoring in Physics and Applied Mathematics. Advised by professor Pedro Sáenz, I conducted natural science research on fluid mechanics and received training on hands-on engineering skills.

I am interested in closing sim2real gap for robot simulation, facilitating robot learning in pure simulator environment and achieving zero-shot deployment in real world. I am proficient in Isaac Sim\Lab with a focus on high-fidelity digital twin and GPU-accelerated computing. I am also a self-confessed geek for computer graphic renderer in video games.

News

04/2025 OceanSim is featured by NVIDIA Robotics!

04/2025 🔥 Beta version of OceanSim is released!

03/2025 🎉 OceanSim will be presented at AQ²UASIM and the late-breaking poster session at ICRA 2025!

12/2024 I have joined the Field Robotics Group at UMich Robotics.

Publications * denotes equal contributions

OceanSim: A GPU-Accelerated Underwater Robot Perception Simulation Framework
arXiv:2503.01074
Song, J.*, Ma, H.*, Bagoren, O., Sethuraman, A., Zhang, Y., & Skinner, K.

[ Code ] [ Web ] [ PDF ] [ Media ] We propose OceanSim, a high-fidelity GPU-accelerated underwater simulator built upon Isaac Sim for underwater robots applications. We leveraged advanced physics-based rendering and GPU computation to reduce the sim-to-real gap for common underwater sensors and fast SDG.

Highlighted Projects

Autonomous Maze Traversal with Wheeled Mobile Robot Autonomous maze exploration and mapping framework for a wheeled robot. The robot performs A* plannning to the evolving frontiers on a 2D occupancy grid map. Lidar scan combined with the particle filter is used for SLAM.

Manipulator Vision-based Object Sorting Object identification and sorting based on shape, color, and size using a RX-200 robotic arm aided by the stereo vision camera.

Spontantous Walking of Solid Particles on Fluid Interfaces Discovered the effect of micro-particles break symmetry and move spontaneously on a vibrated interface between two fluids. Proposed a fluid dynmaic model and simulate in Matlab.

Experimental Platform for Vibrational Fluid Dynamic Research A new mechanical design that leverages Modal Shop electrodynamic shaker interfaced with LabView and NI-DAQ to perform high precision fluid dynamic experiment.

Experience

	Research Assistant Field Robotics Group, UMich, Dec 2024 - Present
	Undergraduate Researcher Physical Mathematics Lab, UNC, Jan 2022 - May 2024

Education

	University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, US Aug 2024 - Present, Master of Science in Robotics
	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US Sep 2020 - May 2024, Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathamatics & Physics

Honors & Awards

Department of Physics and Astronomy, UNC, April 2023	Daniel C. Johnson Outstanding Junior Award Awarded annually to the most outstanding student judged by faculty committee.
Department of Undergraduate Research, UNC, May 2023	Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship 54 recipients at year 2023. $4000 fellowship granted.

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