Research Scientist, Dexterous Manipulation

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Job description

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we're working to build a future where everyone has the freedom to move, engage, and explore. Join us in our mission to improve the quality of human life through advances in artificial intelligence, automated driving, robotics, and materials science. We're dedicated to building a world of "mobility for all" where everyone, regardless of age or ability, can live in harmony with technology to enjoy a better life, through innovations in AI and robots.

Our work is guided by a dedication to safety - in both what we research and how we perform our research, our goal is to benefit society. As a subsidiary of Toyota, TRI is fueled by a diverse and inclusive community of people who bring invaluable leadership, experience, and ideas from leading industry and academic institutions. We are actively involved with the broader academic community and promote the sharing of research outcomes through publications, funding, and open-source software. We're continually searching for the world's best talent - people who are ready to define the new world of mobility with us!

We're building a company helping people to thrive, achieve work-life balance, and bring their best selves to work. At TRI, you will have the opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds - a fun environment with forward-thinking people who enjoy solving tough problems and the financial backing to successfully achieve your goals. Come work with TRI to enable the elderly to age in place. Start your impossible with us.

We're looking for an independent-minded robotics research scientist to help advance the current state-of-the-art for manipulation in unstructured settings. Our mission is to enable the next generation of dexterous robots which continually improve themselves over time; learning from failure and adapting to changing environments. We operate at the intersection of state-of-the-art simulation, perception, controls, and machine learning in the context of robotic manipulation and we measure our success in terms of capabilities that we can transfer towards productization, as well as research impact via publications, seminars, and contributions to open-source software. Robotics is a broad and diverse field; we do not expect a candidate will have all of the individual qualifications we are interested in. If you are passionate about our mission, and think your background makes you well suited to help us push forward towards a future of general and adaptable robots manipulating their surroundings, then come talk to us and help us see how your expertise will help make that future a reality.

Responsibilities:

• Research behavior generation using a variety of techniques such as reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, etc.
• Collaborate with dedicated researchers and engineers to build robotic systems that improve their performance based on experience and large-scale simulation.
• Use an iterative process of continuous improvement to create intelligent and robust robots capable of lifelong learning.
• Operate in a complex environment .
• Research existing robotics/AI/ML/CV algorithms, extend these or innovate new algorithms for robust robot autonomy, including applications around behavior generation such as reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, trajectory optimization, robust learning from demonstration, failure and anomaly detection, and more.
• Explore data-driven approaches to robotics, replacing human assumptions and expertise with learned models and priors.
• Implement new and existing algorithms in high-quality C++/Python.
• Collaborate with research institutions and universities for developing breakthrough capabilities.

Qualifications:

• 4+ years of relevant industry experience or a PhD.
• Hands on experience working with robots, especially with understanding sim to real issues and debugging complex integrated systems.
• Background in some of the following: reinforcement learning, learning from demonstration, manipulator kinematics/dynamics, visuomotor control, skill synthesis, domain adaptation, simulation and graphics, and/or automatic skill composition and task planning.
• Desire to work as part of a team in a fast-paced, agile, results-oriented R&D environment.
• A strong work ethic, a sense of individual curiosity, and a passion to make useful general-purpose robots a reality.
• Experience in professional software development methodologies such as source control, code reviews, coding to style guide, continuous integration, unit testing, functional testing, etc.

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TRI provides Equal Employment Opportunity without regard to the applicant's race, color, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, religion, marital status, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state or local laws.