Research Intern: Intelligent Multimodal Representation for Dexterous Manipulation - Honda Research Institute USA

Research Intern: Intelligent Multimodal Representation for Dexterous Manipulation

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Research Intern: Intelligent Multimodal Representation for Dexterous Manipulation

Job Number: P26INT-24
Honda Research Institute USA (HRI-US) is seeking a self-motivated research intern to advance multimodal perception and learning for dexterous manipulation using multi-fingered robot hands. The internship project focuses on contact-rich manipulation under partial observability, exploring how multimodal sensing can inform both manipulation actions and active exploration to acquire relevant information. The successful candidate will utilize both simulation and real hardware to implement, evaluate, and iteratively improve learning algorithms.
San Jose, CA

 

Key Responsibilities

 
  • Develop and evaluate learning algorithms for multimodal perception and dexterous manipulation. 
  • Collect and process multimodal sensory data and conduct representation and policy training. 
  • Integrate and validate learned models on robotic manipulation platforms.
  • Implement baselines and perform benchmark evaluations on hardware and in simulation.
  • Document findings and contribute to internal research reports.
  • Contribute to the portfolio of patents and publish research results when applicable at top-tier conferences and journals in robotics and machine learning.

 

Minimum Qualifications

 
  • Ph.D. or highly qualified M.S. candidate in robotics, computer science, or a related field.
  • Experience processing and learning from multimodal sensory data (tactile, force, RGB-D, etc.).
  • Experience implementing and evaluating learned policies on real-world robots.
  • Experience with robotic simulators (e.g., Isaac Gym or MuJoCo).
  • Proficient with Python, C++, and PyTorch.
  • Experience with the Robot Operating System (ROS 2).

 

Bonus Qualifications​

  • Experience with multimodal representation learning and sensor fusion.
  • Experience with learned world models and predictive modeling.
  • Experience with vision-language-action or robot foundation models.
  • Experience with dexterous manipulation and contact dynamics.
  • Experience with sim-to-real or reinforcement learning on hardware.

 

Years of Work Experience Required   0
Desired Start Date  May 2027
Internship Duration  3 Months
Position Keywords  Dexterous Manipulation, Multimodal Representation, Active Exploration 

Alternate Way to Apply

Send an e-mail to careers@honda-ri.com with the following:
- Subject line including the job number(s) you are applying for 
- Recent CV 
- A cover letter highlighting relevant background (Optional)

Please, do not contact our office to inquiry about your application status.