Robotics Intern Mobile Manipulation, Learned Policies

Los Altos, CA - USA

Hourly Salary: $ 45 - 65

Posted on: 23 hours ago

Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI) were on a mission to improve the quality of human life. Were developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility weve built a world-class team advancing the state of the art in AI robotics driving and material sciences.

This is a Summer 2026 paid 12-week internship opportunity. Please note that this internship will be a hybrid in-office role.

The Internship

This internship will be embedded within a world-class Robotics team with the mission to develop and integrate innovative solutions that enable a robot to perform complex human-level mobile manipulation tasks navigate with and among people and learn and adapt over time. The team emphasizes developing deploying and validating systems in real-world environments.

The Team

The Mobile Manipulation team is focused on heavily leveraging machine learning to marry perception prediction and action to produce robust and reactive robot behaviors bootstrapping from simulation leveraging large amounts of data and adapting in real-world scenarios.

TRI has the runway roadmap and expertise to transition the technology development to a product that impacts the lives of millions of people. Apply to join a fast-moving team that demands high-risk innovation and learning from failures using rigorous processes to identify key technologies develop a robust high-quality system and quantitatively evaluate performance. As part of the team you will be surrounded and supported by experts in mobile manipulation at TRI and be a part of TRIs positive and diverse culture!

Responsibilities

Develop and integrate VLAs or VAMs (Vision-Action models) linking perception to autonomous robot actions involving complex manipulation and/or navigation.
Invent and deploy innovative solutions combining VLAs with classic optimization-based planners to enhance the robustness of robot behaviors.
Collect clean and visualize a variety of data from robot mobile manipulation tasks.
Gain a deeper understanding of the failure modes and bottlenecks in state-of-the-art robot foundation models.

Qualifications

Currently pursuing a M.S. or P.h.D. in an engineering-related field.
A strong background in connecting robotic perception with robot actions in the real world.
Experience with Pytorch and developing/training deep neural networks.
Strong software engineering skills preferably in both Python and C.
A team player with strong communication skills and a willingness to learn from others.
Passionate about seeing robotics have a real-world large-scale impact.

Bonus Qualifications

Experience scaling learning approaches to large-scale models trained on diverse sources of data including web-scale text images and video.
Deep experience in one of the following areas: VLAs RL manipulation and robot planning.

Please include links to any relevant open-source contributions or technical project write-ups with your application.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $45 and $65/hour for California-based roles and between $40 and $58/hour for Massachusetts-based roles. Base pay offered will depend on multiple individualized factors including but not limited to business or organizational needs market location job-related knowledge skills and experience. TRI offers a generous benefits package including medical dental and vision insurance and paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time). Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

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TRI is fueled by a diverse and inclusive community of people with unique backgrounds education and life experiences. We are dedicated to fostering an innovative and collaborative environment by living the values that are an essential part of our culture. We believe diversity makes us stronger and are proud to provide Equal Employment Opportunity for all without regard to an applicants race color creed gender gender identity or expression sexual orientation national origin age physical or mental disability medical condition religion marital status genetic information veteran status or any other status protected under federal state or local laws.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process such as reviewing applications analyzing resumes or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed please contact us.

Required Experience:

Intern