1.53 Robotics Research Internship, Humanoid Manipulation (Summer 2026) | PhD Internship

Advance Humanoid Manipulation Research

Design, implement, and evaluate manipulation strategies for humanoid robots across diverse tasks.

Explore loco-manipulation problems that integrate perception, planning, and control.

Contribute to research projects from early ideas through on-robot experimentation.

Build Systems That Bridge Research and Deployment

Translate research concepts into working robotic systems tested on real hardware.

Develop experimental setups and tooling to support data collection and evaluation.

Help ensure manipulation systems are robust, reproducible, and field-relevant.

Contribute to Robotics Foundation Model Development

Support data collection pipelines used to train robotics foundation models.

Work with embodiment-agnostic representations to enable transfer across robot platforms.

Collaborate with researchers to integrate manipulation data into scalable learning frameworks.

Collaborate Across Disciplines

Partner with mechanical and electrical engineers on hardware integration and system bring-up.

Work with teleoperators and field teams to refine interfaces and improve manipulation outcomes.

Engage closely with researchers and engineers to align experiments with broader autonomy goals.

Rapidly Iterate and Learn

Prototype quickly, run experiments on hardware, and analyze results rigorously.

Balance exploratory research with concrete deliverables over the course of the internship.

Debug system-level issues spanning software, hardware, and learning.