PhD Robotics Engineering Internship (2027 start)

The Role

We have an exciting opportunity for an internship within our AI & Algorithms department, focused on robotics and robot learning. This is a paid placement of 6–12 months’ duration, with a flexible start date, and is suitable for PhD students nearing completion who are looking to gain industry experience before transitioning into a full-time industry role. We are flexible on the exact duration of this placement and will work to align it to academic needs.

As a Robotics & Robot Learning Engineer (PhD Intern), you'll get involved with a range of diverse projects, working with and supported by a talented team of experts and mentors. You'll engage in hands-on tasks spanning the full pipeline of a robotic learning system — from data collection and model training through to deployment on real hardware. With cutting-edge labs, robotic platforms and computing resources at your disposal, you'll use technology to solve real-world problems across healthcare and industrial applications.

What you’ll be doing

• Working alongside our engineers to build and deploy robot learning systems, from data collection (teleoperation, sensor logging, simulation) through to training, testing, and real-world deployment.

• Getting hands-on with robotic hardware and software integration — helping robots perceive, learn from data, and act reliably in the real world.

• Supporting client projects that apply robotics and AI to solve real-world problems in healthcare and industrial settings.

• Learning software and systems engineering skills in mixed-discipline teams, attending stand-ups and contributing to planning sessions.

• Contributing to our internal research and development programs, building on state-of-the-art robotics and AI literature to produce market-leading solutions and compelling demonstrations that showcase our expertise to clients.

• Communicating the results of your work to colleagues and clients.

What you can bring

We are looking for a final-year PhD student in robotics, computer science, AI/machine learning, or a related computational discipline.

What matters most is that you understand the complexity of a robotic system, and have hands-on experience across the full pipeline, from data collection through to real-world deployment.

You will also have:

• One or more publications in a leading journal or conference relevant to the sector (e.g. in T-RO, ICRA, IROS, ICML, CoRL, RSS, or NeurIPS)

• Practical, hands-on experience collecting data from and/or deploying software or models onto a physical robotic system (e.g. teleoperation, sensor integration, hardware-in-the-loop testing, sim-to-real transfer).

• Strong programming skills (Python and/or C++), comfortable writing and maintaining real software rather than one-off scripts, with an understanding of modern version control (e.g. Git).

• Understanding of mechatronic system (actuators, sensing, etc)

• A clear interest in applying your research to real-world robotics problems, and in making the transition from academia into an industry engineering role.

While not essential requirements, we would also be very interested if you have experience with any of the following:

• ROS or other robotics middleware

• Computer vision (SfM, SLAM, VLM)

• Reinforcement learning or imitation learning

• Transformer, diffusion, VLA, WAM models

• Sensor integration (cameras, force/torque sensors, LiDAR, IMUs)

• Simulation environments (e.g. Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Gazebo)

• Edge compute and embedded deployment

• Bayesian statistics or signal processing

• Prior work in healthcare robotics or industrial automation

Why Cambridge Consultants?

Cambridge Consultants creates exciting and novel breakthroughs in technology and products. Our work on intelligent systems area has helped create world-first and market-changing technologies including real-time AI-enhanced medical imaging, autonomous defence systems against cyberattacks, and edge algorithms to help visually impaired people navigate indoor spaces. In robotics specifically, our teams are working on humanoid platforms and surgical robotic systems, alongside industrial robotics applications, giving interns exposure to some of the most demanding and fast-moving areas of the field. We combine our research output with engineering rigour to create innovative and robust solutions to solve complex problems presented to us by our clients. We help clients across a diverse range of markets, including defence/security, healthcare, biotech, industrial and energy, so there is no shortage of variety.

At the heart of what we do are talented and motivated multi-disciplinary teams empowered to create cutting-edge technologies and systems to solve difficult problems for our clients. We offer a diverse, fun, and challenging work environment where you'll have the chance to work on a wide variety of projects that deliver real value using technology.

We recognise and celebrate individual talent and we understand the importance of letting individuals be just that. Our people are here to do the best work of their lives, and our job is to provide the platform for them to do it.