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The Role
As a Robotics Intern, work on learning from humans to improve robotic manipulation. Responsibilities include creating prototypes, running experiments, and publishing research.
Summary Generated by Built In
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 an in-office role.
The Mission
We are working to create general-purpose robots capable of accomplishing a wide variety of dexterous tasks. To do this, our team is building general-purpose machine learning foundation models for dexterous robot manipulation. These models, which we call Large Behavior Models (LBMs), use generative AI techniques to produce robot action from sensor data and human requests. To accomplish this, we are creating a large curriculum of embodied robot demonstration data and combining that data with a rich corpus of internet-scale text, image, and video data. We are also using high-quality simulation to augment real world robot data with procedurally-generated synthetic demonstrations.
The Team
The Robotics Machine Learning Team’s charter is to push the frontiers of research in robotics and machine learning to develop the future capabilities required for general-purpose robots able to operate in unstructured environments such as homes or factories.
The Internship
We are seeking a Research Intern to join our efforts in learning from humans at scale for robotic manipulation, focusing on how robots can better understand and act on human instructions through experience, interactivity, and large-scale data.
- Learning from egocentric video: Using first-person human data to instruct robots how to act and reason about tasks in the real world.
- Pretraining with human data: pretraining Robot Foundation Models for Dexterous Manipulation using human data at scale
- Instruction following and grounding: Improving how LBM-powered robots interpret and act on natural language and multimodal commands.
- Interactive learning: Building robot agents that can engage with humans to reduce ambiguity in goals and instructions.
- In the wild data collection and learning: Developing scalable methods to acquire, filter, and learn from diverse, unstructured real-world data.
- Learning at scale: Designing data pipelines and model architectures that efficiently train on massive, heterogeneous datasets.
The intern who joins our team will be expected to create working code prototypes, interact frequently with team members, run experiments with both simulated and real (physical) robots, and participate in publishing the work to peer-reviewed venues. We’re looking for an intern who is comfortable working with both existing large static datasets as well as a growing dynamic corpus of robot data.
Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with using machine learning for learned control, including RL, offline RL, or behavior cloning, for manipulation. Or, experience with machine learning and familiarity with large multi-modal datasets and models.
- Strong software development skills in Python.
- A “make it happen” attitude and comfort with fast prototyping.
- A passion for robotics and doing research grounded in important fundamental problems.
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience deploying policies on robots in the real world.
- Experience working in a research environment.
- Experience training foundation models with large-scale datasets.
The pay range for this position at the commencement of employment is expected to be 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, 401(k) eligibility, paid time off benefits (including vacation, sick time, and parental leave), and an annual cash bonus structure. Additional details regarding these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.
Please reference this Candidate Privacy Notice to inform you of the categories of personal information that we collect from individuals who inquire about and/or apply to work for Toyota Research Institute, Inc. or its subsidiaries, including Toyota A.I. Ventures GP, L.P., and the purposes for which we use such personal information.
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.
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.
Top Skills
Python
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The Company
What We Do
Toyota Research Institute (TRI) envisions a future where Toyota products, enabled by TRI technology, dramatically improve quality of life for individuals and society. To achieve its Vision, TRI’s Mission is to create new tools and capabilities focused on improving the human condition through research in Energy & Materials, Human-centered AI, Human Interactive Driving, and Robotics.
We’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. To lead this transformative shift, we are looking for the world's best talent -- people who enjoy solving tough problems while having fun doing it.
Why Work With Us
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.
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