Robotics Applied Scientist, Active Perception

FieldAI • Irvine, CA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

FieldAI’s Irvine team develops risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems for robotics, combining rigorous engineering with learning systems tested and improved through real-world deployments. The Robotics Applied Scientist will research active perception for inspection and other robot behaviors, develop viewpoint-planning policies for active information gathering, and investigate calibrated confidence and abstention for vision-language reasoning on robots. The role owns research and development through real-world experiments that demonstrate feasibility and deployability, helps shape the technical roadmap around real-world needs, and mentors junior team members and collaborators.

The position is based in Irvine, California, where the team builds and tests systems on real hardware and sensors for deployment in unstructured environments. The work contributes to FieldAI’s systems for perception, planning, localization, and manipulation, with emphasis on explainability and safety.

Requirements

• PhD in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field.
• Publications at top venues such as RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, T-FR, T-RO, CVPR, NeurIPS, or similar.
• Research experience in active perception, informative path planning, vision-language models, or semantic mapping for exploration.
• Hands-on work with vision-language or foundation models for robot perception, plus understanding of the physical principles governing them.
• Fluency in Python and ability to run methods on real robots using C++ and ROS 2.
• Principled fluency with uncertainty, including Bayesian or information-theoretic planning, calibration, and conformal methods.

Nice To Haves

• Real-robot experience in the wild.
• Work on metric-semantic scene graphs, open-vocabulary mapping, or spatio-temporal scene representations.
• Experience fine-tuning or deploying compact VLMs on edge computers.
• Exposure to robotic industrial inspection workflows.

Responsibilities

• Formulate the active perception problem for inspection and a broad range of robot behaviors.
• Develop viewpoint-planning policies for active information gathering.
• Research calibrated confidence and abstention for vision-language reasoning on the robot.
• Own research and development through real-world experiments that prove feasibility and deployability.
• Investigate and shape the technical roadmap, aligning real-world needs with technical development.
• Mentor junior team members and collaborators.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree