Internship - Foundation Models for Humanoid Robots

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Department: OR - Optimization and Intelligent Robotics

MERL is seeking a highly motivated Ph.D. 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 box/cart 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.

• Current enrollment in a Ph.D. program in Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Hands-on research experience with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and/or 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, Mu Jo Co ).
• 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 (e.g., RSS, ICRA, T-RO, RA-L, NeurIPS, ICML etc).

• 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.
• Sim-to-real transfer and robotic simulation (Isaac Lab, Mu Jo Co ).
• Experience deploying algorithms on humanoid platforms.

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