Co-op, Robotics Research – Data Engineering

Rockwell Automation•Waterloo, ON

4d•CA$20 - CA$32•Hybrid

About The Position

Rockwell Automation's Robotics Center of Excellence (RCoE) is seeking a passionate Robotics Research Intern to contribute to the intersection of AI theory and hands-on implementation. This role involves working closely with senior researchers to gain experience with cutting-edge embodied intelligence. The primary focus will be on building data tooling and pipelines for data movement, curation, and integration into our platform, directly supporting the development and evaluation of perception and world models using machine learning frameworks.

Requirements

Actively pursuing a bachelors or advanced degree from an accredited college or university.
Legal authorization to work in Canada is required.
Strong foundation in software development, with the ability to design clean, maintainable systems and quickly understand unfamiliar codebases.

Nice To Haves

Demonstrated experience working with datasets, including data processing, organization, and curation to support machine learning workflows, with familiarity with common data quality issues and their mitigation.
Solid understanding of Machine Learning concepts, particularly vision and applied robotics contexts, with a focus on how data impacts model performance.
Hands-on experience working with robotics hardware and sensors.
Practical experience with PyTorch, Tensorflow, TensorRT, HuggingFace, etc.
Exposure to simulation environments or synthetic data generation workflows.
A track record of solving complex, unstructured problems.
Experience with ROS/ROS2
Experience with robotics principles including state estimation and 3D processing
Exposure to foundation models such as Vision-Language-Models
Experience with cloud storage such as Azure, AWS, etc.
Experience with containerization tools such as Docker, Apptainer, etc.
Experience with research, parsing academic publications, and literature review.
Experience engaging with the open source community with track record of working with maintainers to improve libraries.

Responsibilities

Build data tooling and pipelines to ingest, organize, and integrate robot and perception data into our platform, supporting dataset curation and enabling model evaluation workflows, including dataset slicing and active learning loops for continuous improvement.
Collect robot and perception datasets using LiDAR, cameras, and other sensors across a range of scenarios, including both structured experiments and real-world deployments.
Organize, curate, and label perception datasets, contributing to the creation of high-quality datasets for model training and evaluation.
Write clean, scalable, and high-performance code leveraging modern system programming languages and following software engineering best practices.
Document best practices and research through technical reports, white papers, and high-impact publications.