Research Assistant in Dexterous Robot Learning

The Robot Learning Lab in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London is seeking a talented Research Assistant (pre-doc) for an ambitious new project on dexterous robot learning. In this project, we will be studying co-design of robot hardware and control for robot manipulation. Co-design aims to simultaneously optimise the robot hand design (the number of fingers, the shapes of the fingers, and the positions of tactile sensors), and the control policy for that hand, when given a particular task or set of tasks. Through this, we aim to develop a framework that can automatically generate creative new robot hands with dexterous control policies, for human-level or even super-human performance on real-world tasks.

You will be collaborating with a small team at Imperial College led by Dr Edward Johns, as well as a larger team across the UK as part of the ARIA-funded Robot Dexterity programme. This position will be fully funded until March 2028.

You will be assisting PhD students and a post-doc in developing both the algorithms for robot co-design, and the real-world evaluation of the designs that emerge, as well as providing your own research contributions. Your specific role will vary depending on project needs, such as assisting the team with evaluating evolutionary algorithms for exploring creative new hand designs, or reinforcement learning for policy optimisation, all within a huge GPU-based simulation with thousands of robots learning synchronously in parallel.

In particular, you will take a leading role in creating the simulation environment, 3D printing promising robot hand designs, and setting up a robot "arm farm" at Imperial College for evaluating these designs and fine-tuning policies in the real world. You will also help to manage the project’s codebase and assist with the delivery of project milestones. We expect novel algorithms and results to come from this project, and so you will have opportunities to co-author papers with the other team members.

You must have a master’s degree in a relevant area, with content covering robotics and machine learning, and excellent programming skills in Python. You should have research experience in either robotics or machine learning. You should also have either hands-on experience working with physical robots, or strong enthusiasm to gain this experience.

You will have the opportunity to continue your career at a world-leading institution. Imperial College is consistently in the top 10 world university rankings with the Department of Computing ranked top of the 2021 UK REF assessment. You will receive a sector-leading salary and remuneration package (including 38 days off a year) and a comprehensive early career development support package including 10 training and development days.