Robotics Intern - Mobile Manipulation, Learned Policies

At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We’re developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we’ve built a world-class team advancing the state of the art in AI, robotics, driving, and material sciences.

This is a Summer 2026 paid 12-week internship opportunity. Please note that this internship will be a hybrid in-office role.

The Internship
This internship will be embedded within a world-class Robotics team with the mission to develop and integrate innovative solutions that enable a robot to perform complex, human-level mobile manipulation tasks, navigate with and among people, and learn and adapt over time. The team emphasizes developing, deploying, and validating systems in real-world environments.

The Team
The Mobile Manipulation team is focused on heavily leveraging machine learning to marry perception, prediction, and action to produce robust and reactive robot behaviors, bootstrapping from simulation, leveraging large amounts of data, and adapting in real-world scenarios.

TRI has the runway, roadmap, and expertise to transition the technology development to a product that impacts the lives of millions of people. Apply to join a fast-moving team that demands high-risk innovation and learning from failures, using rigorous processes to identify key technologies, develop a robust, high-quality system, and quantitatively evaluate performance. As part of the team, you will be surrounded and supported by experts in mobile manipulation at TRI, and be a part of TRI's positive and diverse culture!

Responsibilities:
• Develop and integrate VLAs or VAMs (Vision-Action models) linking perception to autonomous robot actions involving complex manipulation and/or navigation.
• Invent and deploy innovative solutions combining VLAs with classic optimization-based planners to enhance the robustness of robot behaviors.
• Collect, clean, and visualize a variety of data from robot mobile manipulation tasks.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the failure modes and bottlenecks in state-of-the-art robot foundation models.

Qualifications:
• Currently pursuing a M.S. or P.h.D. in an engineering-related field.
• A strong background in connecting robotic perception with robot actions in the real world.
• Experience with Pytorch and developing/training deep neural networks.
• Strong software engineering skills, preferably in both Python and C++.
• A team player with strong communication skills and a willingness to learn from others.
• Passionate about seeing robotics have a real-world, large-scale impact.

Bonus Qualifications:
• Experience scaling learning approaches to large-scale models trained on diverse sources of data, including web-scale text, images, and video.
• Deep experience in one of the following areas: VLAs, RL, manipulation, and robot planning.

Please include links to any relevant open-source contributions or technical project write-ups with your application.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $45 and $65/hour for California-based roles, and between $40 and $58/hour for Massachusetts-based roles. Base pay offered will depend on multiple individualized factors, including, but not limited to, business or organizational needs, market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. TRI offers a generous benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance, and paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time). Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

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TRI is fueled by a diverse and inclusive community of people with unique backgrounds, education and life experiences. We are dedicated to fostering an innovative and collaborative environment by living the values that are an essential part of our culture. We believe diversity makes us stronger and are proud to provide Equal Employment Opportunity for all, without regard to an 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.

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