AI Robotics Simulation Intern at NIO in San Jose-

Summary: NIO is a pioneer and a leading company in the premium smart electric vehicle market. This internship will focus on advancing high-fidelity simulation infrastructure to support contact-rich robotic manipulation, contributing to areas such as geometric modeling, physics-driven simulation, and visualization for simulation debugging. Responsibilities: - Massively parallel GPU simulation architecture and scalable infrastructure for robot learning - Advanced contact mechanics and numerical methods for contact-rich robotics - System Identification (System ID) and practical sim-to-real transfer techniques - Industry-scale research execution for embodied foundation models - Production-quality, well-documented simulation tools, wrappers, or mesh processing modules integrated into our codebase - A comprehensive technical report documenting: - Experimental design (e.g., for System ID or stress-testing) - Evaluation methodology for contact stability and the sim-to-real gap - Quantitative benchmarking results - An internal presentation to the robotics team demonstrating the new tools during live policy rollouts Required Qualifications: - PhD or strong MS student in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Graphics, or related field - Strong C++ and Python programming skills - Solid foundation in 3D geometry processing, mesh generation, or surface reconstruction - Experience with rendering APIs (OpenGL/WebGL/Vulkan) and GPU programming - Strong debugging skills and system-level thinking Preferred Qualifications: - Hands-on experience with robotics simulators (MuJoCo, Isaac, Bullet, etc.) - Knowledge of collision detection algorithms (e.g., GJK, EPA) and contact modeling (LCP, soft contacts) - Experience with CUDA, parallel computing, or tensor-native operations (e.g., PyTorch) - Familiarity with writing Python bindings for C++ code (e.g., pybind11) and integrating them into ML pipelines - Prior experience working with real robot hardware or sim-to-real transfer pipelines Required Skills: C++, Python, 3D geometry processing, Robotics simulators Important Skills: Rendering APIs, Collision detection algorithms, CUDA, Parallel computing Nice-to-Have Skills: Debugging skills, System-level thinking, Tensor-native operations, Python bindings for C++