Robotics Research Intern, Embodied AI

FieldAI • Irvine, CA

3d

About The Position

FieldAI is hiring a Robotics Research Intern in Embodied AI for Spring or Summer 2027. The intern will investigate research problems in robot behavior and learning, active perception, human-robot interaction, and related areas, with an emphasis on complex, unstructured environments. The role bridges research and real-world deployment: developing algorithms, validating them on physical robots, learning from field data, and contributing to publications at leading robotics and AI venues.

Research areas may include learning and generating robot behaviors from demonstrations, interaction, experience, and real-world data; enabling robots to reason actively about what to inspect, where to observe, and what actions to take; and developing intuitive human-robot collaboration and adaptation to user intent. The intern may also investigate foundation models—including vision-language, vision-language-action, and world models—for reasoning, planning, interaction, and decision-making on physical robots.

The role includes implementing and evaluating research algorithms on robotic platforms in realistic, unstructured environments, using deployment data to improve methods, conducting rigorous experiments, and contributing to research publications. FieldAI builds risk-aware, reliable, field-ready AI systems for robotics and has systems deployed globally. The company is headquartered in Irvine, Southern California, with teammates across the United States and around the world.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Aerospace, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong research foundation in one or more areas such as robot learning, planning and decision-making, embodied AI, perception, active perception, or human-robot interaction.
• Familiarity with state-of-the-art research in embodied AI and robotics.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or C++.
• Experience with modern machine learning frameworks.
• Experience developing and evaluating algorithms for robotic or embodied systems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to formulate research questions and design rigorous experiments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to collaborate across research and engineering teams.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on robotics experience, including testing and deploying autonomous systems on physical robots.
• Experience with ROS or ROS2 and real robotic systems.
• Publications at leading AI and robotics venues such as CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, NeurIPS, CVPR, or similar.
• Research experience in robot behavior and learning, such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning, learning from demonstrations, or learning from interaction and real-world experience.
• Research experience in active perception or active inspection, including task-driven perception, information-gathering behaviors, viewpoint selection, or reasoning under uncertainty.
• Experience in human-robot interaction, language-conditioned robotics, shared autonomy, or interactive robot learning.
• Experience fine-tuning or deploying large multimodal models, particularly vision-language, vision-language-action, open-vocabulary, or related foundation models.

Responsibilities

• Research methods for learning, adapting, and generating robot behaviors from demonstrations, interaction, experience, and real-world data.
• Develop methods for active perception and embodied reasoning, including deciding what to inspect, where to observe, and what actions to take based on task objectives, observations, uncertainty, and environmental context.
• Develop approaches for intuitive human-robot collaboration, including natural task specification, interactive robot behaviors, human-in-the-loop reasoning, and adaptation to user intent and feedback.
• Investigate and adapt foundation models, including vision-language models, vision-language-action models, and world models, for physical-robot reasoning, planning, interaction, and decision-making.
• Implement and evaluate research algorithms on robotic platforms in realistic, unstructured environments.
• Use deployment and field data to iteratively improve research methods.
• Conduct research, design rigorous experiments and evaluations, and contribute to publications at leading robotics and AI conferences and journals.

What This Job Offers

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