Research Scientist (Robotics) at AI Robot Association

Tokyo, , Japan -

Full Time

Start Date

Immediate

Expiry Date

24 Dec, 25

Salary

0.0

Posted On

25 Sep, 25

Experience

2 year(s) or above

Remote Job

Yes

Telecommute

Yes

Sponsor Visa

Skills

Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Teleoperation Systems, C++, Python, ROS, Data Collection, Simulation, Model Evaluation, Multimodal Learning, Tactile Manipulation, Control Strategies, Impedance Control, Adaptive Control, Force Control

Industry

technology;Information and Internet

Description

About AIRoA The AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is launching a groundbreaking initiative: collecting one million hours of humanoid robot operation data with hundreds of robots, and leveraging it to train the world’s most powerful Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. What makes AIRoA unique is not only the unprecedented scale of real-world data and humanoid platforms, but also our commitment to making everything open and accessible. We are building a shared “robot data ecosystem” where datasets, trained models, and benchmarks are available to everyone. Researchers around the world will be able to evaluate their models on standardized humanoid robots through our open evaluation platform. For researchers, this means an opportunity to: - Work on fundamental challenges in robotics and AI: multimodal learning, tactile-rich manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and large-scale benchmarking. - Access state-of-the-art infrastructure: hundreds of humanoid robots, GPU clusters, high-fidelity simulators, and a global-scale evaluation pipeline. - Collaborate with leading experts across academia and industry, and publish results that will shape the next decade of robotics. - Contribute to an initiative that will redefine the future of embodied AI—with all results made open to the world. As we prepare for our official launch on October 1, 2025, we are assembling a world-class team ready to pioneer the next era of robotics. We invite ambitious researchers and engineers to join us in this bold challenge to rewrite the history of robotics. Job Description In this role, you will be responsible for: - Designing and building scalable data collection systems that operate across hundreds of humanoid and mobile robots. - Developing semi-autonomous teleoperation systems that ensure low latency, high controllability, and minimal operator workload. - Creating automated pipelines to deploy trained models and rigorously evaluate them in both simulation and real-world robotic platforms. - Working closely with the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) team to seamlessly integrate and deploy cutting-edge models onto physical robots. Required Qualifications - MS degree with 3+ years of industry experience, or PhD in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field. - Extensive hands-on experience with physical robotic systems (e.g., mobile manipulators, humanoids). - Deep knowledge of teleoperation systems, including leader–follower architectures, AR, or VR interfaces. - Strong programming proficiency in C++, Python, and ROS 1/2. Preferred Qualifications PhD or equivalent research experience in robot learning. - Strong publication record at top-tier robotics venues (e.g., RSS, CoRL, Science Robotics, TRO, IJRR). - Practical experience implementing advanced control strategies on hardware, including impedance control, adaptive control, force control, or MPC. - Experience using tactile sensing for dexterous manipulation and contact-rich tasks. - Prior experience leading or contributing to large-scale robot data collection initiatives. - Familiarity with simulation platforms and benchmarks (e.g., MuJoCo, PyBullet, Isaac Sim) for training and evaluation. There are currently no comparable projects in the world that collect data and develop foundation models on such a large scale. As mentioned above, this is one of Japan’s leading national projects, supported by a substantial investment of 20.5 billion yen from NEDO. This position will play a crucial role in determining the success of the project. You will have broad discretion and responsibility, and we are confident that, if successful, you will gain both a great sense of achievement and the opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to society. Furthermore, we strongly encourage engineers to actively build their careers through this project—for example, by publishing research papers and engaging in academic activities.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for designing and building scalable data collection systems across hundreds of humanoid and mobile robots. Additionally, you will develop semi-autonomous teleoperation systems and create automated pipelines for model deployment and evaluation.