Robot Manipulation & Control Intern

# Robot Manipulation & Control Intern Palo Alto, CA Internship

On-site $20-$75/hour based on experience

Posted July 30, 2026

Apply for this role About the role## Overview Real Hand  is an AI robotics company building dexterous robotic hands and the intelligence that drives them. The goal of the company is to give machines human-level dexterity — hardware that survives real-world contact, and policies learned from how humans actually use their hands. Our hands are deployed on humanoid and mobile platforms across research, automation, and human-robot collaboration.

Real Hand is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.We are looking for a Robot Manipulation & Control Intern to work on the layer where a policy's intent becomes force on an object. You will write controllers, planners, and perception stacks for our dexterous hands and arm platforms, deploy state-of-the-art learning-based methods on real setups, and be responsible for whether they actually work day after day.

Contact-rich manipulation punishes sloppy physics, so you will spend real time in simulation as well as on hardware — and care about the gap between them.

This is an on-site internship with a direct path to a full-time role.

Salary range: $20-$75/hour based on experience.

What you will do## Responsibilities
* Develop and tune controllers for dexterous hands and arms: impedance and admittance control, force and tactile feedback, compliant contact behavior, and in-hand manipulation primitives
* Implement manipulation behaviors including grasping, pick-and-place, object reorientation, tool use, and bimanual coordination — as classical pipelines, learned policies, or hybrids
* Build perception for manipulation: egocentric and eye-in-hand pose estimation, grasp affordance prediction, 6-DoF object pose, and visual servoing under occlusion by the hand itself
* Model the hand and its contact behavior in physical simulation, validate that simulated controller performance predicts real performance, and close the gap where it does not
* Write and maintain production-quality Python and C++ for robot platforms: real-time loops, hardware interfaces, safety limits, and tests
* Collaborate with the ML team to deploy learned policies on hardware — latency budgets, observation and action space design, safety envelopes, and failure fallback
* Build calibration, system identification, and diagnostic tooling so the platform stays trustworthy over months of use
* Evaluate tradeoffs between classical control and learning-based approaches and make principled design decisions
* Continuously improve robotic software for performance, reliability, and scalability

What you bring## Requirements
* Demonstrated experience deploying software on real robot hardware
* Strong robotics fundamentals: kinematics, dynamics, control theory, motion planning, and contact mechanics
* Experience writing controllers and integrating them with a full robotics software stack (ROS/ROS2 or equivalent middleware)
* Practical experience with a physics simulator for contact-rich manipulation (Isaac Sim, Mu Jo Co , Genesis, SAPIEN, or equivalent), and a clear-eyed view of where its contact model is and is not trustworthy
* Familiarity with egocentric and wrist-mounted camera setups for manipulation, and the occlusion and calibration problems they create
* Proficiency in Python and C++; experience with at least one deep learning framework
* Ability to design experiments, analyze failures, and iterate quickly in real-world robotic systems
* Thrive in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where solutions require exploration and ownership

Nice to have## Bonus qualifications
* Currently enrolled in an MS or PhD program in Robotics, Computer Science, EE, ME, or a related field
* Experience with dexterous or multi-fingered hands, tactile sensing, or in-hand manipulation
* Experience with imitation learning or RL for manipulation (diffusion policy, ACT, VLA models, or similar)
* Teleoperation system design — gloves, exoskeletons, VR, or hand-tracking based
* 3D geometry and multi-sensor fusion: RGB-D, stereo, LiDAR, point clouds, meshes
* Publication record at ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, or top-tier ML/CV venues
* Passion for building robots that do real physical work outside the lab