Robotics Research Intern - Post-Training

tri; Los Altos (CA); On-site; USD 48,000 - 80,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) eligibility

Paid time off

Job summary

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is offering a paid internship in Cambridge, MA, focusing on robotics and AI research. Interns will develop code prototypes, run experiments on real and simulated robots, and collaborate with experts across hardware, ML, and perception.

The role emphasizes publishing results and contributing to ongoing projects. Pay is $40 to $58 per hour, with benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) eligibility, and paid time off.

Responsibilities

• Create working code prototypes for robot systems and software.
• Run experiments with both simulated and real robots, validating ideas and collecting data.
• Collaborate with team members across hardware, simulation, perception, controls and ML.
• Contribute to publishing research results in peer‑reviewed venues.

Job description

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we're on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We're developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we've built a world-class team in Large Behavior Models, Robotics, Energy & Materials, Human-Centered AI, and Human-Interactive Driving.

This is a paid internship opportunity. Please note that this internship will be an in-office role in Cambridge, MA.

The Vision

We envision a future with robots that help people in our real environments, with interactions that allow robots to understand, adapt, and grow with us. We believe that robots should and will work well alongside people: helping where wanted, and ultimately enabling people to spend more time on the activities they enjoy most. To achieve this, robots need to be able to operate reliably in messy, unstructured environments. We must also create robots that people can understand, collaborate with, and rely on.

The Team

Our goal is to revolutionize the field of robotics, enabling long-horizon dexterous behaviors to be efficiently taught, learned, and improved over time in diverse, real-world environments with people.

Our team has deep cross-functional expertise across hardware, simulation, perception, controls, and machine learning. We measure our success in terms of fundamental capabilities development, as well as research impact via open-source software and publications. Come join us and let's make general-purpose robots a reality.

Some of our ongoing work is highlighted here.

The Internship

We have several research thrusts under our broad mission, and we are looking for a research intern in any of these areas:

• Data-efficient and general algorithms for learning robust policies leveraging multiple sensing modalities: proprioception, images, force, and dense tactile sensing.
• Scaling learning approaches to large-scale models trained on diverse sources of data including web-scale text, images, and video.
• Quick and efficient improvement of learned policies.
• Developing and deploying learned policies and complex mobile manipulator embodiments, such as humanoid robots.

The intern who joins our team will be expected to create working code prototypes, interact frequently with team members, run experiments with both simulated and real (physical) robots, and participate in publishing the work to peer-reviewed venues. We're looking for an intern who is comfortable working with both existing large static datasets as well as a growing and dynamic corpus of robot data.

Areas of focus

• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for mobile manipulation
• Dynamic whole-body manipulation on humanoids
• Cross-embodiment transfer
• Universal (UMI-style or ego-centric) data collection methods
• Haptic/tactile-inclusive VLA models
• Integration of VLA policy methods with model-based robotics methods
• Large-scale synthetic data generation and sim-to-real transfer
• Post-training for continual learning

Pay and Benefits

• Pay range: $40 to $58/hour for Massachusetts-based roles
• Base pay offered will depend on multiple individualized factors, including, but not limited to, business or organizational needs, market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
• Benefits: medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) eligibility
• Paid time off benefits (including vacation, sick time, and parental leave)
• Annual cash bonus structure
• Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

Please reference this Candidate Privacy Notice to inform you of the categories of personal information that we collect from individuals who inquire about and/or apply to work for Toyota Research Institute, Inc. or its subsidiaries, including Toyota A.I. Ventures GP, L.P., and the purposes for which we use such personal information.

TRI is fueled by a diverse and inclusive community of people with unique backgrounds, education and life experiences. We are dedicated to fostering an innovative and collaborative environment by living the values that are an essential part of our culture. We believe diversity makes us stronger and are proud to provide Equal Employment Opportunity for all, without regard to an applicant's race, color, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, religion, marital status, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state or local laws.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction rec