2 months ago
Responsibilities
- Improve the architecture, algorithms, real-time performance, testing, and maintainability of the overall controls stack.
- Advance whole-body control for wheeled-base and biped platforms, coordinating bases or legs with upper-body manipulation.
- Address high-impact problems including learning-based hand control, mobile manipulation, teleoperation, and estimation.
- Translate model-based and learning-based methods from simulation through hardware bring-up and deployment.
- Improve robot speed, payload, reliability, and safety with measurable results.
- Set technical direction across the controls stack and influence the roadmap across locomotion, manipulation, teleoperation, reinforcement learning, and estimation teams.
- Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and best practices.
- Collaborate with hardware, systems, and reinforcement learning teams to develop solutions and diagnose system-level issues.
Requirements
- Deep knowledge of kinematics, dynamics, state estimation, and optimization/control theory.
- Proven expertise in whole-body control, including WBC/OSC, QP-based control, or MPC, for floating-base legged or mobile wheeled systems.
- Hands-on experience applying learning-based control or reinforcement learning to robotics, including training in simulation.
- Breadth across mobile manipulation, dexterity or hand control, and teleoperation.
- Strong real-time C++ and Python software engineering skills for robotic systems.
- Industry experience developing production-grade controllers and validating or deploying algorithms on physical robot hardware.
- MS or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- At least 8 years of relevant industry experience in robot controls, or at least 4 years with a PhD, with a track record of getting controllers working on physical hardware.
- Preferred experience shipping controllers to a production fleet or market at scale, dexterous or in-hand manipulation, legged locomotion, or safety-critical or certified software.
- Ability to meet physical requirements including prolonged desk and computer work, occasional lifting of 15 pounds, and the vision, hearing, and speech needed for work communication.
About Apptronik
Apptronik designs and manufactures AI-enabled humanoid robots, led by its Apollo platform, to automate tasks alongside people in manufacturing and logistics, with potential use in healthcare and homes. The privately held company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and grew out of the University of Texas at Austin’s Human Centered Robotics Lab; its team previously worked on NASA’s Valkyrie robot. Apptronik’s business model centers on selling robots and the software and services needed to deploy them in industrial environments.