Sheng Zhong

Robotics Research Engineer | PhD UM Robotics

San Jose, California, United States

About

PhD student with research focused on hybrid systems and motion planning. In my spare time, I enjoying programming contests, hackathons, and building open source tools.

Experience

  • Robotics Research Engineer at Sunday
    Jan 2026 - Present · 7 mos

  • Senior Applied Scientist, Simulation at Cruise
    Dec 2024 - Jan 2026 · 1 yr 2 mos

  • Graduate Student Research Assistant at University of Michigan
    Aug 2018 - Dec 2024 · 6 yrs 5 mos

  • Software Engineer Intern at Kepler Communications Inc.
    May 2018 - Aug 2018 · 4 mos

    For 12 weeks during the summer of 2018 I worked at Kepler Communications as a software engineering intern. I designed and implemented the mission control software backend to replace a third party solution with scalability and usability issues. Kepler is a Toronto startup providing communication services with low earth orbit satellites. Challenges from this situation include communication opportunities being limited to when the satellite is above a ground station (a pass), and frequently dropped packets. ● designed and developed mission control backend for commanding and communicating with satellites to replace 3rd party software ● scaled communication to potentially tens of satellites simultaneously ● modularized architecture to allow for handling of any communication protocol without affecting interaction logic ● allowed for task scheduling and progress saving across passes

  • Research and Development Intern at Verity Studios AG
    May 2016 - Aug 2017 · 1 yr 4 mos

    I modelled the localization system that inform quadrocopters of their location and help them fly smoothly: ● derived from physics first principles ● estimates localization performance at any point given hypothetical flightspace configuration ● achieves 0.86 correlation with real performance (95% confidence interval of >0.80) I also designed and developed a robust, high performance parameters system: ● works on the PC and various microcontroller hardware platforms with no code duplication ● real time performance ● retain parameter values intelligibly after firmware updates ● serialize into a cross-platform and cross-version format ● improved usability so much that a coworker wrote: "Tears of joy come to my eyes seeing how much simpler the code becomes"