PhD Robotics Research Intern: Physical AI in Real Robots

Palona; Los Altos; On-site; EUR 13,000 - 20,000; Part time

Job summary

Palona is seeking a PhD Research Intern with a strong robotics background to prototype and evaluate the next stage of our Physical AI stack. You will work on connecting interaction understanding models to real robots in dynamic environments, with initial use cases in restaurants and healthcare where timely, context-aware decisions matter.

This hands-on research role blends frontier AI with practical robotics, aiming for robust perception, timing, and execution in real systems and potential

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in a relevant field.
• Strong hands-on robotics experience in an academic or industrial lab.
• Experience programming, training, integrating, and debugging real robots.
• Familiarity with robotic perception, planning, control, or embodied AI systems.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and C++.
• Experience with PyTorch is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Extend interaction understanding models for real-time robotic deployment decisions.
• Build closed-loop systems connecting perception, planning, robot execution, monitoring, and replanning.
• Develop methods to decide when, where, and how a robot should act based on physical-world events.
• Integrate and program real robotic platforms for research and pre-production experiments.
• Monitor robot execution, detect failures or deviations, and trigger rapid replanning and redeployment.
• Design experiments for constrained robotics tasks in restaurant and healthcare environments.
• Evaluate system robustness across changes in actors, objects, timings, and environments.
• Explore interaction-centric representations to support reliable robot behavior.
• Contribute to research publications, prototypes, and patentable innovations.

Skills

PhD candidate in Robotics

Robotics hands-on experience

Python & C++

PyTorch

ROS/ROS2

System integration

Education

Ongoing PhD in Robotics, CS, AI, CV, ML

Tools

ROS/ROS2

PyTorch

Robot Operating Systems

Job description

Palona is seeking a PhD Research Intern with a strong robotics background to prototype and evaluate the next stage of our Physical AI stack. You will work on connecting interaction understanding models to real robots in dynamic environments, with initial use cases in restaurants and healthcare where timely, context-aware decisions matter.

This hands-on research role blends frontier AI with practical robotics, aiming for robust perception, timing, and execution in real systems and potential