At Toyota Research Institute (TRI), we’re on a mission to improve the quality of human life. We’re developing new tools and capabilities to amplify the human experience. To lead this transformative shift in mobility, we’ve built a world-class team in Energy & Materials, Human-Centered AI, Human Interactive Driving, and Robotics.
This is a summer 2025 paid 12-week internship opportunity with the HRI team of the LBM (Large Behavior Model) department at TRI. Please note that this internship will be a hybrid in-office role, based in Cambridge, MA.
The Team
The HRI team aims to create compelling, seamless, and effective interactions between humans and robots using LBMs that adhere to a human-centered design. Our team bridges complementary research and engineering expertise in physical HRI, user-centered design, extended reality interfaces, teleoperation, humanoid systems, software development, planning and controls, and robot learning. We’re working on bringing human input into the development and evaluation of LBMs, specifically focusing on tasks and interactions relevant to older adults’ needs and wants, where the overarching goal is to support aging in place through robotics. We’re also implementing data-driven robot policies that can account for a person’s preferences and feedback, especially in the context of policy errors/failures.
The Internship
We are looking for an intern researcher to join our Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) team in the Cambridge, MA office! In collaboration with the wider Large Behavior Model (LBM) department, you will focus on categorizing and detecting policy failures in real-world tasks based on the impact on the HRI. You will develop reactive, multimodal classifiers to discriminate different levels of robot policy failures that occur in HRI. You will help rapidly test these classifiers and develop mitigation strategies (e.g., safeguards in robot behavior, feedback mechanisms to provide information to users, etc.) for critical robot failures, which will be evaluated through experiments on real hardware that interacts with real people. The resulting monitors and mitigation strategies for HRI failures will lead to the production of maintainable code and documentation. Lastly, you will have the opportunity to present your study findings to your colleagues and the larger TRI organization. We welcome you to join a positive, friendly, and enthusiastic team of researchers, where your research will contribute to helping people gain independence, access, and mobility.
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TRI is fueled by a diverse and inclusive community of people with unique backgrounds, education and life experiences. We are dedicated to fostering an innovative and collaborative environment by living the values that are an essential part of our culture. We believe diversity makes us stronger and are proud to provide Equal Employment Opportunity for all, without regard to an applicant’s race, color, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, religion, marital status, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state or local laws.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.
TRI's mission is to improve the quality of human life through advances in artificial intelligence, automated driving, and robotics.
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