Internship Openings

MERL is seeking a highly motivated graduate student for a research position in guidance, navigation, and control of spacecraft. The ideal candidate is a PhD student with strong experience in trajectory generation and sequential convex optimization, stochastic optimal control and state estimation, and astrodynamics and the three-body problem. Publication of results produced during the internship is expected. The expected duration of the internship is 3-6 months with a flexible start date.

Required Specific Experience

• Current enrollment in a PhD program in Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
• Familiarity with convex optimization solvers
• Strong programming skills in Matlab, Python, and/or C/C++

MERL is seeking a highly motivated graduate student to develop high-fidelity full-stack GNC simulators for space applications. The ideal candidate has strong experience with rendering engines, synthetic image generation, and computer vision, as well as familiarity with spacecraft dynamics, motion planning, and state estimation. The developed software should allow for closed-loop execution with the synthetic imagery, and ideally allow for real-time visualization. Publication of results produced during the internship is desired. The expected duration of the internship is 3-6 months with a flexible start date.

Required Specific Experience

• Current enrollment in a graduate program in Aerospace, Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

• Experience with one or more of Blender, Unreal, Unity, along with their APIs

• Strong programming skills in one or more of Matlab, Python, and/or C/C++

MERL is seeking a self-motivated and qualified individual to work on developing an integer/mixed-integer programming solver customarily designed for coordination planning of aerial drones. The ideal candidate will be a PhD student in computer science, mathematics, industrial engineering, or a related discipline, with a solid background in integer optimization. Preferred skills include knowledge of branch-price-and-cut algorithm or column generation, and hands-on experience with callbacks of the Gurobi Optimizer; strong programming skills and experience with at least one of Python, Julia, C/C++, Matlab are also expected. Publication of results produced during the internship is desired. The expected start date is in Fall 2025 or Spring 2026, for a duration of 3- months.

Required Specific Experience

• Significant hands-on experience with integer optimization.
  • Experience with trajectory optimization is a plus.
• Fluency in at least one of: Python, Julia, C/C++, Matlab
• Completed their MS, or >30% of their PhD program

MERL is seeking a highly motivated intern to collaborate in the development decision making, planning and control for teams of ground robot in task such as coverage control, monitoring and pursuit-evasion. The ideal candidate is a PhD student with strong experience in planning and control of multi-agent systems, with background in advanced model-based (e.g., MPC) and learning-based (e.g., RL) methods. The results of the internship are expected to be published in top-tier conferences and/or journals. The internship will take place during Fall/Winter 2025 (exact dates are flexible) with an expected duration of 3-6 months.

Please use your cover letter to explain how you meet the following requirements, preferably with links to papers, code repositories, etc., indicating your proficiency.

Required Experience

• Current enrollment in a PhD program in Mechanical, Electrical, Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science or related programs, with a focus on Robotics and/or Control Systems
• Experience in as many as possible of:
  • Formal methods and set based methods (temporal logics, reachability, invariance)
  • Model predictive control (design, analysis, solvers)
  • Reinforcement learning for planning
  • Cooperative planning and control for multi-agent systems
  • Programming in Python or Matlab or Julia

Additional Useful Experience

• Knowledge of one or more physics simulators for robotics (e.g., MuJoco)
• Experience with coverage control and pursuit-evasion problems
• Programming in C/C++ or Simulink code generation

MERL is seeking a highly motivated intern to collaborate in the development of outdoor, offroad applications of quadruped robots, with wildlife monitoring and farming as examples. The overall project involves multiple developments including robust gait control, optimal gait generation in uncertain terrain conditions, planning and allocation of multiple robots. The work will be validated in simulation first, and experimental validation will be possible (if time permits) on robotic platforms on-site. The results of the internship are expected to be published in top-tier conferences and/or journals. The internship will take place during Fall/Winter 2025 (exact dates are flexible) with an expected duration of 3-6 months.

Please use your cover letter to explain how you meet the following requirements, preferably with links to papers, code repositories, etc., indicating your proficiency.

Required Experience

• Current enrollment in a PhD program in Mechanical, Electrical, Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science or related programs, with a focus on Robotics and/or Control Systems
• Experience in some/all of these topics:
  • Planning and control for legged robots
  • Modeling and control in offroad scenarios
  • ROS and simulation environment for robots control,
  • Strong programming skills in Python and/or C/C++

Additional Useful Experience

• Modeling of terrain uncertaint
• Robust control and planning under uncertainty
• Coverage control in uncertain scenarios
• Experience with computer vision