Co-op, Robotics Research – Physical AI
About The Position
Rockwell Automation's Robotics Center of Excellence (RCoE) is seeking a passionate Robotics Research Intern to contribute to the development of next-generation Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, World Models, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) frameworks. This role offers hands-on experience at the intersection of AI theory and practical implementation, working with cutting-edge embodied intelligence and world-class experts. The RCoE is focused on transforming industrial operations by moving beyond traditional automation towards Autonomous Operations, emphasizing rapid prototyping and innovation.
Requirements
- Actively pursuing a bachelor's or advanced degree from an accredited college or university.
- Legal authorization to work in Canada is required.
- Must be comfortable deriving a loss function on a whiteboard and debugging a real-world robot.
- Obsessive curiosity about how machines interact with the physical world.
- Ability to take a vaguely defined problem and run with it.
- Thrive in a high-performing team where peer review and collective brainstorming elevate everyone.
- Invent new tools and libraries when the current state-of-the-art falls short.
- Desire to see code moving tons of steel in the real world, not just in simulation.
Nice To Haves
- Core understanding of Machine Learning concepts, particularly vision and robotics applications.
- Hands-on experience working with robotics hardware and sensors.
- Experience curating and managing training datasets.
- Strong foundation in software development, with the ability to design clean, maintainable systems and quickly understand unfamiliar codebases.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch, LeRobot, HuggingFace, etc.
- Exposure to simulation environments for data generation.
- A track record of solving complex, unstructured problems.
- Experience with ROS/ROS2.
- Experience with robotics manipulation principles, control and planning.
- Exposure to foundation models such as Vision-Language-Action models.
- Experience with research, parsing academic publications, and literature review.
- Experience engaging with the open source community with a track record of working with maintainers to improve libraries.
Responsibilities
- Collect, manage, and process physical AI datasets to enable development of industrial tasks.
- Train, fine-tune, and evaluate multi-modal robotics models for real-world industrial tasks.
- Develop "sim-to-real" pipelines using them to accelerate policy training.
- Write clean, scalable, and high-performance code leveraging modern system programming languages and following software engineering best practices.
- Document research through technical reports, white papers, and high-impact publications.
Benefits
- Health Insurance including Medical and Dental
- Health Care Spending Account (HCSA – dependent on the plan chosen)
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Retirement plans
- Paid Time off
- Volunteering Time off
- Employer Savings Plan Matching (includes RRSP, TFSA, and EPSP)
- Employer Paid DC Pension
- Maternity and Parental Leave Top-Up
- Fitness Reimbursement Program
- Flexible Work Schedule
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
Associate degree
