Job Title: Research Assistant (SSI)
University-Level Unit: Smart Systems Institute
Faculty/Department-Level Unit: Smart Systems Institute
Employee Category: Research Staff
Location: Kent Ridge Campus
Posting Start Date: 04/08/2026
Job Description
The Research Assistant will develop the core components of the Data Engine Minimum Viable Product (DEM), an end-to-end system for collecting, curating and leveraging large-scale robot manipulation data for training generalist robot policies.
Specific duties include:
- Develop automated data quality assessment methods, including uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection, to identify and filter low-quality or unsafe demonstrations.
- Build and maintain teleoperation and data-collection rigs for real robot platforms, including motion retargeting, inverse kinematics and bimanual/whole-body control.
- Train, fine-tune and benchmark vision-language-action (VLA) and imitation learning policies on curated datasets; run systematic studies on data scale, mixture and augmentation. Optimise policy inference for real-time deployment on physical robots.
- Maintain a well-documented, reproducible research codebase and support dataset and software releases.
- Contribute to publications, technical reports and progress reports to the funding partner; present findings at project and group meetings.
- Mentor student assistants and interns, and collaborate with project partners and other lab members.
Qualifications and Requirements
- Master's degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics or a related discipline.
- Strong programming ability in Python and C++, with hands-on experience in ROS/ROS2.
- Practical experience with real robot manipulators, including teleoperation, retargeting, inverse kinematics or optimal/adaptive control.
- Experience training deep learning models in PyTorch, with working knowledge of imitation learning / behaviour cloning and vision-language-action or large multimodal models.
- Experience building large-scale data pipelines — dataset curation, standard robot data formats, versioning and quality control — is an advantage.
- Track record of peer-reviewed publications at robotics or machine learning venues (e.g. CoRL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, NeurIPS) preferred.
- Good written and spoken English; able to work independently as well as in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team.
Req ID: 33960