Embedded Systems & Robotics R&D Engineer

This role focuses on the embedded systems, sensor integration, and real-time software R&D required to operate robotic characters autonomously and interactively. You will develop the on-board compute architecture, multi-modal sensor pipelines, real-time control loops, and wireless communication systems that connect trained AI policies to physical robot hardware.

R&D Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain embedded software for real-time actuator control, sensor fusion (IMU, encoders, temperature sensors), and on-board policy inference at high update rates (50–600 Hz).
• Design and implement multi-modal sensor data pipelines for streaming, processing, and logging motion, thermal, and environmental data from the robot platform.
• Research and develop communication protocols (BLE, Wi-Fi, WebSocket) for wireless teleoperation, puppeteering, and remote monitoring of robotic characters.
• Implement the runtime deployment pipeline: state estimation, neural network policy inference, action upsampling and interpolation, low-pass filtering, and smooth motor command generation.
• Develop SDK and API layers that abstract hardware interfaces, enabling the AI and control teams to deploy and test new policies without low-level hardware expertise.
• Research embedded compute optimisation strategies (model quantisation, inference acceleration) for deploying neural network policies on resource-constrained platforms (NVIDIA Jetson, STM32, Raspberry Pi).
• Design and implement safety-critical monitoring systems including actuator thermal monitoring, overcurrent protection, and hardware fault detection and recovery.
• Conduct system integration testing, hardware-in-the-loop validation, and field reliability testing.

Requirements

• Bachelor or Master degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Robotics, Embedded Systems, Computer Engineering, or a closely related STEM discipline from a recognised institution.
• Hands-on experience with embedded system development on microcontrollers (STM32, ESP32, or equivalent) and/or single-board computers (NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi).
• Strong programming skills in Python and C/C++ for both application-level and real-time embedded software.
• Experience with sensor integration (IMU, accelerometers, encoders) and real-time data acquisition pipelines.
• Understanding of control theory fundamentals (PID, LQR, state-space methods) and their implementation on embedded hardware.
• Familiarity with wireless communication protocols (BLE, Wi-Fi, serial bus protocols).
• Ability to work collaboratively in a bilingual (English/Chinese) R&D environment.

Desirable

• Experience with robotics frameworks (ROS/ROS2) or embodied AI development platforms.
• Prior work on multi-degree-of-freedom robotic systems (balancing robots, legged robots, robotic arms).
• Experience developing Python SDKs or API frameworks for hardware abstraction.
• Familiarity with neural network inference on edge devices (TensorRT, ONNX Runtime).
• Background in spatial computing, LiDAR processing, or 3D sensing.
• Publications or award-winning projects in robotics, embedded systems, or related fields.