Research Intern, Robotics – Summer 2027

Details

NVIDIA's Seattle Robotics Lab conducts fundamental and applied robotics research across the full robotics stack, including perception, planning, control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, simulation, and robotics foundation models. The lab's research transfers into NVIDIA's robotics and simulation products, including Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Isaac Manipulator, Isaac Lab-Arena, Cosmos, and Newton.

The lab is seeking PhD-candidate interns to make deep, hands-on technical contributions to research projects. Interns may work on independent projects aligned with internal efforts or directly contribute to existing research initiatives. The role offers opportunities to contribute to high-impact research and collaborate with researchers across robotics and AI.

Responsibilities

• Develop algorithms, foundation models, and methods for robotic manipulation and/or loco-manipulation for industrial, scientific, and household applications.
• Integrate methods into real-world robotic manipulation systems, including collaborative and industrial robot arms, mobile manipulators, humanoids, and dexterous hands.
• Contribute to multi-person research projects spanning robotics and machine learning.
• Engage with the academic community through publications, conferences, workshops, and code releases.
• Develop AI agents to accelerate research and engineering while ensuring correctness, reproducibility, and security.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Knowledge of both robotics and AI theory and practice, with an interest in real-world robotics applications.
• Demonstrated research track record, including first-author work published in leading robotics and AI conferences or journals such as RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IJRR, T-RO, Science Robotics, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and EMNLP.
• Exceptional communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills, with significant team experience.
• Exceptional Python programming skills; familiarity with C++, CUDA, and Warp is a plus.
• Fluency in modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience with AI coding and research agents, including critical validation of their outputs.
• Experience with robotics frameworks such as ROS2 and physics simulation frameworks such as Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Newton, and/or MuJoCo.
• Ability to work through the complexities of simulation and real-world robotics, including debugging physics simulators and renderers, setting up and maintaining complex robotics hardware, debugging communication systems, and designing robust workflows for model training and evaluation.

Areas Of Interest

• Bimanual and dexterous manipulation
• Mobile manipulation and humanoid loco-manipulation
• Multimodal robot learning, including vision, tactile, and force/torque sensing
• Classical and neural simulation, sim-to-real, real-to-sim, and world models
• Learning in the real world, including imitation learning and reinforcement learning
• Robot foundation models, including VLAs, WAMs, and world models, with pre-training, mid-training, and post-training using simulation, teleoperation, and egocentric data
• Agentic robotics
• Robot learning theory
• High-precision manipulation and reliable policy deployment
• Scientific lab automation

Location

The Seattle Robotics Lab is primarily located in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood.

Benefits

Interns are eligible for NVIDIA intern benefits. Applications will be accepted at least until September 25, 2026. NVIDIA is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment.