Robotics Intern, Human-Robot Interaction

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 paid 12-week internship opportunity and is a hybrid, in-office role.

Here’s a glimpse into the Internship experience from some of our TRI interns!

We are looking for an intern researcher to join our team in the Cambridge, MA office! In collaboration with the wider Robotics Research division, you will focus on understanding how general population (non-roboticist) users expect to collaborate with robots performing real-world tasks, with a particular focus on communicating preferences through multimodal modes of communication (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile, etc). You will plan and execute a human-robot interaction study.

You may incorporate a longitudinal element to the project, exploring how user expectations may adapt over multiple interactions with robot behaviors. Findings from the user study may yield peer-reviewed conference papers or journal articles. Lastly, you will have the opportunity to present your study findings to your colleagues and the larger TRI organization.

We welcome you to join a positive, friendly, and enthusiastic team of researchers, where your research will contribute to helping people gain independence, access, and mobility.

Qualifications

• Pursuing MS or PhD degree in Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Robotics, Computer Science, or a related field or equivalent practical experience.

• 2+ years experience as an academic Human-Robot Interaction researcher

• Strong software engineering skills (C++ / Python preferred) and experience analyzing/debugging autonomous robotic systems.

• Experience with deploying and/or field-servicing prototype technologies.

• Experience conducting user studies involving real robot hardware.

• Experience with writing peer-reviewed conference papers or journal articles as lead author.

• Desire to contribute back to the robotics community with publications and open source code.

• Passion for seeing robotics help humans and have a real-world, large-scale impact.

Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with original ROS/ROS 2 or similar middleware, and with robotic simulators including Drake, Mujoco, Bullet, etc
• Experience with behavior cloning and related imitation learning methods.
• Experience with interactive machine learning techniques that adapt robot policies given human feedback/corrections.
• Experience with qualitative and quantitative user research, including developing user study materials, IRB applications, facilitation and interviewing, management of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and statistical analysis.
• Experience with UX design principles and high-fidelity prototyping.
• System integration experience around complex, open-ended, and multi-functional projects.