Research Scientist, HRI Research to Enable Collaborative Humanoid Robots

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

We are looking for Research Scientists to join the Robotics team whose mission is to “Build embodied AI responsibly to benefit people in the physical world. This role is focused on foundational collaborative robotics research and unlocking capabilities to enable safe and effective interaction between people and robots. 

Research Scientists work on a diverse and stimulating range of projects including: inventing algorithms and prototype applications, working with real robots in the lab and outside the lab tackling real world use cases. Research Scientists work in large collaborative teams to make cutting edge breakthroughs to advance Robotics AI. We believe large foundation models will transform general purpose Robotics like with our Gemini Robotics models. This role will involve working with a diverse multi-functional team that builds the future of robotics. 

Key responsibilities:

• Design, implement, train and evaluate large models and algorithms for humanoid robots. 
• Make breakthroughs and unlock new humanoid safety capabilities. Areas of focus include:
• Human Robot Communication: Verbal and Nonverbal, includes research on Bidirectional Native Audio Robotics Models, voice and persona development, and gesture generation.
• Human Perception and Intent Understanding: Understanding where people are in the environment and what they are doing so that the robot can react appropriately.
• Human Physical Safety Aware VLAs: Make VLAs safe with Safe Stops, Avoidance of unintentional collisions, compliant controllers, and behavior that modulates with respect to nearby people.
• Write software to implement research ideas and iterate quickly.
• Leverage your expertise to participate in a wide variety of research: learning from simulation, reinforcement learning, learning from demonstrations, vision-language-action models, transformers, video generation, robot control, humanoid robots and more.
• Work effectively with a large collaborative team with fast-paced agendas to meet ambitious research goals.
• Generate creative ideas, set up experiments and test hypotheses. Report and present research findings clearly and efficiently both internally and externally.

In order to set you up for success as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, we look for the following skills and experience:

• PhD in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• Knowledge of the latest in large machine learning research. 
• Experience working with real-world robots

In addition, expertise with a subset of the following would be an advantage: 

• Research track record in one or more of the following topics: HRI, Humanoid Whole Body Control, Vision Language Action models; Motion Planning, Force Control, AI Safety, Diffusion Policies, World Models, Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning, Sim2Real Transfer, Alignment Techniques
• Expertise in using large datasets with deep neural networks to make real robots useful

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $141,000 - $202,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your targeted location during the hiring process.

At Google DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.