Robotics Engineer

Position Summary

The Robotics Engineer will design, implement, integrate, and verify robotic control, safety, sensing, and interface functions for the ARIES (Autonomous Robotics & Imaging Ecosystem for Stroke) program. This role focuses on deterministic, explainable, and auditable robotic behavior in a real-time medical robotics environment, including trajectory generation, force-based command modulation, safety filtering, signal-quality monitoring, and hardware/software integration.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and validate robotic control logic for real-time actuation, safety-supervised motion, and hardware/software integration.
• Develop and implement real-time trajectory generation methods, including spline interpolation, motion profiles, and joint-space/task-space planning.
• Design and tune admittance/impedance control strategies for force-based command modulation and safety filtering.
• Use estimator outputs, signal processing, and diagnostic data to detect unsafe, degraded, or unreliable robotic behavior.
• Expose hardware signals, device states, sensor status, communication quality, and diagnostics through clear reusable interfaces.
• Validate robotic functions in simulation, hardware-in-the-loop setups, bench experiments, and real hardware environments.
• Document assumptions, interfaces, safety limits, validation evidence, and implementation behavior clearly.

Required Experience

• Experience developing control algorithms for robotic, mechatronic, automation, or comparable cyber-physical systems.
• Strong background in real-time trajectory generation, motion profiles, joint-space/task-space planning, and velocity/acceleration constraints.
• Practical understanding of admittance/impedance control and force-based safety-supervised motion.
• Ability to work with estimator outputs, disturbance terms, uncertainty indicators, and estimator failure modes.
• Experience with time-series analysis, filtering, trend detection, and signal-quality assessment.
• Hands-on experience integrating control or robotics software in real-time, embedded, robotics, or industrial automation environments.
• Experience with C++, Python, Linux, ROS, DDS, MATLAB, Simulink, or comparable tools for robotics development and integration.
• Ability to validate robotic behavior through simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, bench experiments, and real hardware integration.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with autonomous robotics, medical robotics, image-guided therapy systems, or other safety-critical cyber-physical systems.
• Familiarity with underactuated, continuum, catheter, guidewire, or other flexible robotic systems.
• Experience defining conservative safety thresholds with limited ground-truth data.
• Experience with medical device development, regulated product development, or verification planning.

Education

Required: Master’s degree in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Control Engineering, or a related technical field. Preferred: PhD in Robotics, Control systems, Real-time systems, or Mechatronics.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Connects actuation, sensing, safety logic, and software into reliable robotic behavior.
• Works well across architecture, control, electrical, software, and partner teams.
• Values deterministic behavior, testability, traceability, and clear validation evidence.