Junior Research Scientist (Robotics)

About the role

The AI Robot Association (AIRoA) is recruiting a Junior Research Scientist (Robotics) to help build a shared robot data ecosystem: one million hours of humanoid robot operation data collected with hundreds of robots, used to train Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. The project is a major national initiative supported by 20.5 billion yen from NEDO, with an official launch planned for October 1, 2025. The work takes place at the Tokyo Ryutsu Center in Heiwajima, Ota-ku, Tokyo.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build scalable data collection systems operating across hundreds of humanoid and mobile robots.
• Develop semi-autonomous teleoperation systems with low latency, high controllability and minimal operator workload.
• Create automated pipelines to deploy trained models and evaluate them in simulation and on real robots.
• Work closely with the VLA team to integrate and deploy models on physical robots.

Required profile

• 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 (mobile robots, manipulators such as UR5, Franka Emika, HSR, or humanoids such as Spot).
• Ability to control real robots with ROS / ROS2, including full-stack integration and deployment.
• Solid understanding of teleoperation, AR/VR interfaces and leader-follower architectures.
• Proven ability to work independently and collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams.
• Candidates focused only on theoretical research (e.g. reinforcement learning or explainable AI) without practical robotics experience will not be considered.

Required skills

• Strong C++ and Python, with production-level code and system-level integration.
• Preferred: publications in top robotics venues (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, TRO, IJRR); publications only in CVPR, ICCV or NeurIPS may be scored lower.
• Preferred: experience with advanced control strategies, tactile sensing, large-scale robot data collection, simulators (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, PyBullet) and Sim2Real or VLA integration.