Optical Sensing Intern - Robot Perception

Rhoda AI • Mountain View, CA

3d

About The Position

Rhoda AI is building generalist intelligent robots and owns the full robotics stack, including hardware, robot systems, infrastructure, and foundation world models. The company is developing robots for complex real-world environments, including warehouses where sensors may encounter bright sunlight, shiny floors, glass, dust, and heat.

The Optical Sensing Intern will design and conduct experiments to assess optical sensors, identify the conditions and causes of sensor failures, and recommend sensor settings or other mitigations. The intern will work directly with perception and hardware engineers, and their findings will inform sensor choices, configuration, and requirements for detection algorithms. This is a hands-on internship involving lab work and, when necessary, field testing.

Requirements

• Pursuing an MS in Optics, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computer Vision, or Robotics.
• Research or lab experience designing experiments.
• Strong grasp of optical sensing physics, including image formation, noise, dynamic range, time-of-flight, and LiDAR principles.
• Hands-on experience with cameras, LiDAR, time-of-flight, or other optical sensors in a lab or on a robot.
• Comfort with sensor SDKs, drivers, and configuration.
• Python skills for numerical analysis and image or point-cloud processing, using tools such as NumPy, OpenCV, or Open3D.
• Curiosity to investigate the causes of sensor problems and creativity in finding fixes.
• Ability to explain results clearly in writing and with plots to people outside their specialty.

Nice To Haves

• Camera or sensor calibration experience.
• Thermal or infrared imaging experience.
• Optical modeling or sensor simulation experience.
• ROS 2 and recorded-data tools.

Responsibilities

• Design experiments to answer engineering questions about sensor settings and performance in conditions such as direct sunlight.
• Analyze sensor failures by investigating physical factors such as ambient light, dynamic range, multipath, reflectance, angle of incidence, and heat.
• Propose and test mitigations, including different settings, filters, mounting changes, or software checks.
• Build scenes, targets, and scenarios that reproduce real-world conditions in the lab and, when needed, in the field.
• Use sensor SDKs and firmware to sweep and tune settings such as exposure, gain, frame rate, range modes, and filtering.
• Write Python to process images and point clouds and produce quantitative measures such as range, accuracy, noise, and dropout.
• Present findings and recommendations to engineers.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern