Research Scientist Intern, Robot Learning & Manipulation (Spring, Summer & Fall 2027) | Master’s & PhD Internship

FieldAI • Irvine, CA

12d • Onsite

About The Position

FieldAI is offering spring, summer, and fall 2027 research internships in its Irvine office for master’s and PhD students advancing robotic manipulation. The intern will investigate how robots can perform useful physical tasks reliably across diverse objects, environments, and robot platforms. Working closely with researchers and engineers, the intern will own a focused research project and help translate promising ideas into capabilities that can be tested on hardware and improved through real deployment experience. Research directions and methods will be shaped by the intern’s expertise and field problems. The goal is to produce original research with measurable impact on what FieldAI’s robots can accomplish.

The work focuses on manipulation challenges grounded in customer use cases and operational needs, with opportunities to evaluate systems beyond controlled laboratory settings. The intern will develop and validate work on physical robotic systems, including humanoids, mobile manipulators, and arm-equipped quadrupeds, and collaborate with teams across robot learning, perception, control, hardware, and deployment. Research may be suitable for leading conferences and journals, with opportunities to release code, datasets, or other research artifacts.

Requirements

• Current enrollment in a master’s or PhD program in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, AI/ML, or a closely related field.
• Research experience in robotic manipulation, robot learning, embodied AI, or a related area.
• A strong research or open-source track record, demonstrated through substantive publications, research software, or technically rigorous projects.
• Clear ownership of original research or technical development, including implementation and evaluation.
• Strong foundations in robotics, machine learning, and experimental design.
• Proficiency in Python and/or C++.
• Ability to work independently, communicate findings clearly, and collaborate across research and engineering disciplines.

Nice To Haves

• First-author publications at venues such as RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICLR, or ICML, or journals such as RA-L, T-RO, or IJRR.
• Significant contributions to open-source robotics or machine learning projects with demonstrated adoption.
• Hands-on experience taking research from an initial idea to reliable operation on physical robots.
• Experience evaluating robotic systems outside controlled laboratory conditions.
• Public research code, datasets, or robot demonstrations showing technical depth and measurable results.
• Experience with robot integration, sensing, control, or data collection infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Develop manipulation capabilities that address meaningful physical tasks in real environments.
• Investigate how skills transfer across objects, tasks, environments, and robot platforms.
• Address practical challenges such as uncertainty, contact, changing conditions, and failure recovery.
• Design experiments that measure task success, generalization, and reliability under realistic operating conditions.
• Integrate and validate research on physical robots, collaborating with engineering teams to address system constraints.
• Document findings, present results, and contribute to publications or reusable research tools.
• Own a focused research project from approach and implementation through experimentation and hardware validation.
• Use observations and failure cases from real operation to guide research and improve reliability.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern