Controls Engineering Intern / Student Researcher

Antares • Los Angeles, CA

4d • $34 - $36 • Onsite

About The Position

A hands-on controls role for a student who wants to take theory all the way to real hardware.
The Antares Mission Engineering Team is seeking a motivated master’s student or advanced undergraduate student, preferably junior year or above, to participate in controls engineering for nuclear technology and support hands-on controls development for prototype terrestrial and space electromechanical systems. The ideal candidate has a strong foundation in classical controls and is excited to bridge theory with real hardware, especially in robotics, actuation, or experimental automation systems.
This role will involve designing, implementing, and testing control loops using commercial off-the-shelf hardware such as NI DAQ systems, programmable power supplies, motor drives, sensors, and electrical actuation hardware. The work will span system identification, time-domain modeling, Laplace-domain control design, data acquisition, and closed-loop validation on physical hardware.
This role is 5 days a week in our Torrance, CA headquarters - remote candidates will not be considered.

Requirements

• Current master’s student or junior/senior undergraduate in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, robotics, controls, aerospace, or related field
• Strong understanding of classical control theory
• Experience with time-domain modeling and Laplace-domain control design
• Ability to move between continuous-time and discrete-time control representations, including converting Laplace-domain models into time-steppable simulations suitable for controller implementation and numerical analysis
• Familiarity with PID control, transfer functions, stability, bandwidth, and transient response
• Hands-on experience with actuation systems such as motors, heaters, valves, servos, linear actuators, or similar hardware
• Comfortable working with sensors, DAQs, electrical drive hardware, and experimental test setups
• Strong Python programming experience, including building reusable simulation components, numerical test harnesses, and controller validation tools beyond basic array manipulation

Nice To Haves

• Robotics or mechatronics project experience
• Experience bringing up and integrating COTS test hardware such as NI DAQs, motor drives, power supplies, relays, sensors, and instrumentation, including debugging, calibration, and test procedure development
• Experience writing Python scripts for data acquisition, control-loop execution, logging, and analysis
• Experience with NI DAQ hardware, DAQmx, or Python-based data acquisition
• Experience working with high-voltage systems or relevant high-voltage safety training
• Familiarity with motor controllers, programmable power supplies, thermocouples, encoders, load cells, or similar instrumentation
• Experience with system identification, frequency response, or closed-loop tuning
• Comfort reading schematics, wiring test setups, and debugging hardware/software interfaces
• Prior work on robotic arms, mobile robots, test stands, thermal systems, or actuator characterization
• Experience taking a controller from whiteboard math to real hardware
• A practical instinct for noisy sensors, real-world delays, saturation, and hardware limits

Responsibilities

• Develop and tune classical controllers for actuation and thermal/electromechanical systems
• Build time-domain models of physical systems from first principles and experimental data
• Design controllers using Laplace-domain tools, including transfer functions, poles/zeros, bandwidth, stability margins, and step-response analysis
• Compare model predictions against experimental behavior, work with hardware responsible engineers to interpret test results, and iterate on controller design
• Iterate on digital twins using field test data and multiphysics simulation results

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Associate degree