PhD Robotics Research Intern: Real-World AI for Robots

Palona AI; Los Altos (CA); On-site; USD 47,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Palona AI is building the operational intelligence layer for Physical AI. This PhD Research Intern role focuses on extending interaction understanding to real-time robotic deployment decisions within dynamic environments such as restaurants and healthcare.

You will prototype and evaluate next-stage stack by connecting perception, planning, and execution on real robots, with emphasis on robustness and potential publications.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in robotics or AI-related field.
• Strong hands-on robotics experience from academic or industrial labs.
• Experience programming, training, integrating, and debugging real robots.
• Familiar with perception, planning, control, or embodied AI systems.
• Proficient in Python and C++.
• Experience with PyTorch.

Responsibilities

• Extend interaction understanding models to support 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.
• Design experiments for constrained but economically useful robotics tasks in restaurant and healthcare environments.
• Evaluate system robustness across changes in actors, objects, locations, timing, and environments.
• Explore how interaction-centric representations can support reliable robot behavior.
• Contribute to research publications, prototypes, and potentially patentable system innovations.

Skills

Python

C++

PyTorch

Robotics hands-on

Research to real systems

Education

PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, AI, CV, ML, or related field

Tools

ROS/ROS2

Simulation environments

Motion planning

Robotic middleware

Job description

Palona AI is building the operational intelligence layer for Physical AI. This PhD Research Intern role focuses on extending interaction understanding to real-time robotic deployment decisions within dynamic environments such as restaurants and healthcare.

You will prototype and evaluate next-stage stack by connecting perception, planning, and execution on real robots, with emphasis on robustness and potential publications.