PhD Research Intern, Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research - 2027

About the role

We are recruiting outstanding Research Interns to work on autonomous vehicles, robotics, and physical AI. The NVIDIA Autonomous Systems and Physical AI Research (ASPIRE) group tackles fundamental challenges such as developing new training paradigms that use perception and interaction, providing online and offline safety assurances, enabling navigation across new environments and embodiments, and building systems that reason under uncertainty while interacting safely with people and other agents. Our interdisciplinary team conducts foundational research in foundation model design, embodied reasoning, safety, closed‑loop training and evaluation, and agentic workflows for Physical AI. We also explore decision‑making under uncertainty, deep learning, reinforcement learning, simulation, and verification and validation of safety‑critical AI systems. Researchers are encouraged to publish their work and open‑source code, and they collaborate closely with experts across NVIDIA in autonomous vehicles, robotics, perception, simulation, and machine learning.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement cutting‑edge techniques for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and physical AI.
• Conduct original research and publish results at leading conferences and journals.
• Collaborate with research colleagues, internal product teams, and external researchers.
• Transfer developed technology to relevant product groups.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Relevant research experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, embodied AI, or autonomous systems.
• Strong knowledge of theory and practice of vehicle or robot autonomy, or expertise in a related area with a strong interest in applying work to autonomous systems.
• Track record of research excellence demonstrated through publications at conferences such as RSS, ICRA, CoRL, IJRR, NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, TAC, etc., and/or open‑source software contributions.
• Exceptional Python programming skills; experience with C++ and parallel programming (e.g., CUDA) is a plus.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, and the ability to thrive in a dynamic, research‑focused team.

Pay

The hourly rate for our interns is 38 USD – 94 USD, based on position, location, year in school, degree, and experience.

Benefits

Interns are eligible for NVIDIA intern benefits.

Applications will be accepted at least until September 17, 2026.