Robotics Intern - Mobile Manipulation, Perception

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 in Automated Driving, Energy & Materials, Human-Centered AI, Human Interactive Driving, Large Behavior Models, and Robotics.

This is a summer 2026 paid 12-week internship opportunity. Please note that this internship will be an 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, reactive, coordinated 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, integrate, and deploy algorithms linking perception to autonomous robot actions, including manipulation, navigation, mapping/localization, and human-robot interaction.
• Invent and deploy innovative solutions at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, multi-sensor perception, and simulation for understanding human environments and humans.
• Invent novel ways to generate, build, label, and use large, possibly distributed, datasets using self-supervision, active learning, simulation, synthetic rendering, and real-world adaptation.

Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in an engineering-related field.
• A strong background in inventing and deploying innovative perception algorithms to robotic systems in real-world environments.
• Experience in areas such as object detection, classification, segmentation, and tracking, sensor fusion, state estimation, local and global 3D mapping and reconstruction, person detection, and human pose estimation.
• Experience in developing and training deep nets and applying deep learning to perception problems.
• Strong software engineering skills, preferably in both Python and C++, and analysis and debugging of robotic perception algorithms.
• 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.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $45 and $65/hour for California-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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