Human Interactive Driving Research Intern, Perception for Driving at the Limits

Toyota Research Institute•Los Altos, CA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Toyota Research Institute is hiring a paid, 12-week Summer 2027 research intern for its Extreme Performance Intelligent Control team. The team advances vehicle safety and performance using optimization, machine learning, and computer vision, developing perception and filtering frameworks for extreme vehicle maneuvering that match or exceed expert-driver skills. The internship is a hybrid, in-office role at TRI headquarters in Los Altos, California, and includes experiments with high-performance vehicles on a closed racetrack. The intern will develop perception, embodied reasoning, modeling, and/or control methodologies for high-performance driving, then implement, deploy, and evaluate algorithms on high-performance cars. The work offers an opportunity to pursue novel research and validate it in hardware. Results will be presented internally and at international conferences.

Requirements

Be a Ph.D. candidate working in computer vision, machine learning, robotics, embodied reasoning, or a related field.
Be proficient in at least one of Python, C++, ROS(2), PyTorch, or JAX.
Have experience deploying algorithms on real-world platforms.
Have excellent collaboration and communication skills.
Have a strong interest in advancing the limits of vehicle autonomy and embodied AI.

Nice To Haves

Experience with geometric foundation models, LiDAR/visual inertial odometry stacks, and/or Bayesian filtering methods.
Relevant open-source contributions or technical project write-ups to share with the application.

Responsibilities

Develop new perception, modeling, embodied reasoning, and/or control algorithms.
Implement, deploy, and evaluate models and algorithms on high-performance cars.
Present results verbally and in writing, internally and at international conferences.