PhD Internship: Vision-Language-Action Robotics Research

merl; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 67,000 - 89,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation stipend

Travel coverage to/from MERL

Charlie Card for local commuting

Health insurance eligibility after 90+

Immigration support

Job summary

MERL seeks a highly motivated Ph.D. student to research Vision-Language-Action models for robotic manipulation.

The internship will explore reliable VLA policies with opportunities in multi-arm coordination and adaptive industrial manipulation tasks, including reliability assessment and corrective-action strategies. You will work with MERL researchers to develop and deploy learning-based policies, run simulations and real-world experiments, and present findings at major robotics conferences.

Qualifications

• Current enrollment in a Ph.D. program.
• Strong background in robot learning for manipulation.
• Hands-on experience with VLA models for robotics.
• Proficiency with ROS, Python, and PyTorch.
• Experience with robotic simulation environments and sim-to-real transfer.
• Experience deploying and evaluating learning-based policies on physical robotic platforms.
• Strong publication record or demonstrated research potential.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement novel algorithms in VLA for robotic manipulation.
• Deploy and evaluate learning-based policies on robotic platforms.
• Conduct simulation and real-world experiments to validate methods.
• Disseminate research findings at leading robotics conferences (ICRA, RSS, CoRL, IROS).

Skills

Robot learning for manipulation

VLA models

ROS

Python

PyTorch

Sim-to-real transfer

Policy deployment

Education

Ph.D. program

Job description

MERL seeks a highly motivated Ph.D. student to research Vision-Language-Action models for robotic manipulation.

The internship will explore reliable VLA policies with opportunities in multi-arm coordination and adaptive industrial manipulation tasks, including reliability assessment and corrective-action strategies. You will work with MERL researchers to develop and deploy learning-based policies, run simulations and real-world experiments, and present findings at major robotics conferences.