Research Scientist (Robotics)

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.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or M.S. with 3+ years of equivalent industry or research experience.
• Extensive hands-on experience with physical robotic platforms (e.g., mobile robots, manipulators such as UR5, Franka Emika, HSR, or humanoids like Spot).
• Demonstrated ability to control real robots using ROS / ROS2, including full-stack integration and deployment.
• Solid understanding and implementation experience in teleoperation, AR/VR interfaces, and leader–follower architectures.
• Strong programming proficiency in C++ and Python, with ability to contribute production-level code and perform system-level integration.
• Proven ability to work both independently and collaboratively in multidisciplinary research and engineering teams.

■Note

• Candidates focused solely on theoretical research (e.g., reinforcement learning or explainable AI) without practical robotics experience will not be considered.
• However, candidates do not necessarily need to meet every single qualification to be considered for this role.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publication record in top-tier robotics conferences or journals (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, TRO, IJRR).
• Publications limited to CVPR, ICCV, or NeurIPS could be considered AI-centric and scored lower for this position.
• Experience implementing advanced control strategies on hardware (impedance control, force/torque control, admittance control, or model predictive control).
• Practical experience with tactile sensing or contact-rich manipulation.
• Experience leading or contributing to large-scale robot data collection or fleet management systems.
• Familiarity with robotic simulators (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or PyBullet) for training and evaluation.
• Experience integrating Sim2Real transfer or Vision–Language–Action (VLA) models onto real robotic systems.

Benefits

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.