HRI Researcher
About The Position
As an HRI Researcher at Ludo Robotics, you will shape how robots and people connect - designing, studying, and evaluating how robots perceive, interpret, and respond to human behavior in real-world settings. You will collaborate with engineers, designers, and domain experts to prototype socially capable robots that exhibit natural, acceptable, and effective behaviors across diverse contexts. The ideal candidate brings deep knowledge of human-robot interaction, social cognition, or adjacent fields and the curiosity to translate that knowledge into working systems deployed on physical robots. You will help define how our robots look, act, and communicate as social agents in the world.
Requirements
- PhD or Master's degree in Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Robotics, or a related field (or equivalent research experience).
- Hands-on prototyping experience with robots (humanoid, mobile, or custom platforms) or virtual agents.
- Experience designing and running controlled user studies, participatory design sessions.
- Comfort working across disciplines, translating between user insights, theoretical models, and engineering constraints.
- A genuine curiosity about people and what makes interactions feel natural, safe, and engaging.
- Ability to implement or collaborate on technical systems - familiarity with ROS, Python, or related robotics tools is a plus.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with large language models (LLMs) is a plus, particularly in building conversational AI or dialog systems, or applying LLMs to robot behavior such as natural language understanding and task planning.
Responsibilities
- Contribute to research at the frontier of robot social intelligence, including gaze behavior, turn-taking, dialog, gesture, emotional expression, proxemics, and other socially acceptable robot behaviors.
- Design and conduct experiments, and field deployments to evaluate how people perceive and interact with our robots.
- Develop theoretical frameworks and translate them into prototype robot behaviors, bridging HRI theory with real-world system implementation.
- Synthesize findings from academic literature across HCI, social robotics, cognitive science, and AI to inform research direction and prototype design.
- Integrate social behavior models into robot control pipelines.
- Help establish metrics and evaluation frameworks for socially intelligent robot behavior.
Benefits
- This position is also eligible for equity compensation and a comprehensive benefits package.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
