Internship – Foundation Models for Humanoid Robots

MERL is seeking a highly motivated PhD student to conduct research on foundation models for humanoid robot loco manipulation in factory automation with a focus on understanding their capabilities limitations safety and robustness The internship will focus on developing humanoid systems for material handling tasks such as boxcart transportation kitting tool manipulation failure recovery and other mobile manipulation tasks in warehouse and manufacturing environments The intern will collaborate closely with MERL researchers to develop novel algorithms that integrate Vision Language Action VLA models world models and robot control for robust long horizon manipulation on real humanoid platforms Successful candidates should have demonstrated research experience in embodied AI robot learning or computer vision with the goal of publishing at leading robotics and AI conferences Start date and duration is flexible

Required Specific Experience

• Current enrollment in a PhD program in Mechanical Engineering Computer Science Electrical Engineering or a related field
• Hands on research experience with Vision Language Action VLA models andor multimodal foundation models for robotics
• Research experience with world models for robotic planning prediction or decision making
• Sim to real transfer and robotic simulation Isaac Lab MuJoCo
• Strong publication record or demonstrated research potential in robotics embodied AI computer vision or machine learning
• Must have some publications in top robotic or AI conferences journals eg RSS ICRA T RO RA L NeurIPS ICML etc

Desired Experience

• Contact rich manipulation and force controlled manipulation
• Whole body control for humanoid robots
• Dexterous manipulation or bimanual manipulation
• Reinforcement learning or imitation learning for robotics
• Robot perception 3D vision or state estimation
• Sim to real transfer and robotic simulation Isaac Lab MuJoCo
• Experience deploying algorithms on humanoid platforms

The pay range for this internship position will be 6 8K per month

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