Robotics Engineering Intern

About the job

Job Description

Primary Function of Position

The Robotics Engineering Intern will report to future forward research lad and contribute to creating a sim-to-real-to-sim platform for the Intuitive surgical robot system. The intern will enable rapid prototyping and de-risking of new controller architectures, particularly semi-supervised and supervised autonomous systems that are data-hungry and require extensive validation. Key functions include developing tools that systematically transfer and test controllers from simulation to robot hardware, building virtual models of the surgical field for simulation interaction, and closing the loop between simulation and reality to accelerate development and evaluation of autonomous controllers.

Essential Job Duties

• Implement novel control architectures in high-level (e.g., MATLAB) and low-level (e.g., embedded C++) targets.
• Systematically test controller performance in simulation and on robot hardware.
• Create simulation environments that integrate constrained rigid-body dynamics (e.g., MuJoCo) and realistic texture and lighting (e.g., Isaac Sim).
• Synthesize simulated environments from video data, including geometry, texture, and inferred stiffness.
• Execute closed-loop round-trip tests: train a controller in simulation, test it experimentally, and use experimental data to construct new simulation environments.