Internship - Embodied AI & Humanoid Robotics

About the role

Join our cutting-edge research team to help advance the next generation of Embodied AI and Humanoid Robotics. As a research intern, you will develop AI technologies that enable humanoid robots to understand, reason, and interact with the physical world through complex manipulation, assembly, and tool-use tasks. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to impactful research with the goal of publishing at leading AI and robotics conferences.

Responsibilities

Depending on your background and interests, projects may include:

• Embodied AI for dexterous manipulation, assembly, and tool use
• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and Foundation Models for robotic control
• World-Action Models (WAM) for long-horizon planning and decision making
• Learning from human demonstrations, teleoperation, and autonomous data collection
• Sim-to-real transfer, reinforcement learning, and real-world robot deployment

Requirements

• Strong research experience in robotics, embodied AI, machine learning, computer vision, or related fields
• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX, and strong Python programming skills
• Familiarity with one or more of the following:
  • Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models
  • Foundation Models or multimodal AI
  • Reinforcement learning or imitation learning
  • Robot manipulation, motion planning, or control
  • Agentic AI systems for robotics

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with humanoid or loco manipulators (e.g., Unitree G1)
• Experience with teleoperation systems (e.g., Pico, Sonic)
• Experience with robotics simulators (e.g., Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Genesis)
• Familiarity with ROS/ROS 2 and real-world robot experimentation
• Familiarity with policy deployment on edge AI devices (e.g., Jetson GPUs)

Internship Details

Duration: Approximately 4 months
Start Date: Flexible
Location: Cambridge, MA
Objective: Conduct high-impact research leading to publications at premier AI and robotics conferences (e.g., CoRL, RSS, ICRA, IROS, NeurIPS, ICML)

Pay

The pay range for this internship position will be $6,000–$8,000 per month.

Benefits

• Relocation stipend
• Covered travel to and from MERL
• Monthly Charlie Card for local commuting
• Weekly social gatherings and professional development opportunities, including research talks by both internal and external speakers
• Health insurance coverage after a 90-day waiting period
• Immigration support for qualified candidates as needed