PhD: Physical AI for Safe, Adaptive Robotic Manipulation

Aarhus University (AU); Aarhus; On-site; DKK 400,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

Aarhus University invites applications for a fully funded three-year PhD position in Physical AI for Adaptive Robot Manipulation. The role is based in the Adaptive & Agentic AI (A3) Lab at the ECE department, incl. collaboration with SDU. The project STORM aims to give robotic foundation models a sense of touch.

The candidate will build the ML core, study contact representations, and validate methods on dexterous manipulation with safety constraints.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in a quantitative field with start date before or at the begin date of the PhD.
• Strong background in ML, deep learning, CV or robotics with motivation in Physical AI.
• Experience with Python/PyTorch and modern deep architectures.
• Hands-on robotics experience or willingness to work with hardware.

Responsibilities

• Develop the machine-learning core of STORM, including tactile sensing approaches.
• Investigate contact representations and short-horizon predictive models.
• Explore parameter-efficient adaptation of foundation policies while ensuring safety.
• Evaluate methods on public benchmarks and real robotic setups.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Transformers

Machine Learning

Robotics

Vision-Language Models

English communication

Education

Master's degree in CS/ML/Robotics

Tools

ROS 2

Job description

Aarhus University invites applications for a fully funded three-year PhD position in Physical AI for Adaptive Robot Manipulation. The role is based in the Adaptive & Agentic AI (A3) Lab at the ECE department, incl. collaboration with SDU. The project STORM aims to give robotic foundation models a sense of touch.

The candidate will build the ML core, study contact representations, and validate methods on dexterous manipulation with safety constraints.