Research Engineer – Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language for Robotics

BlueHalo is seeking a Research Engineer in the area of Machine Learning for Robotics and Natural Language Processing, to serve at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH. The position will be in collaboration with the Digital Manufacturing Research Team of the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate.

Fields like artificial intelligence, computer vision, and collaborative robotics are advancing rapidly with impact in numerous application spaces. Long term success in environments such as aerospace manufacturing and maintenance will require greater accuracy, reliability, and attention to detail than other areas. Our team of researchers aims to meet this challenge through innovative techniques including leveraging multiple modalities of input data, careful fine-tuning for particular use cases of interest, and emphasizing specialized approaches such as semantic segmentation sitting within higher level, generalist architectures. The ideal candidate will propose, develop, and characterize novel approaches to advance the ways humans can interact with collaborative robots and AI generally in manufacturing and maintenance environments.

Key Responsibilities:

• Collect and curate datasets for advancing human-machine co-learning by developing custom techniques for multimodal data acquisition, post-processing, automatic tagging, and cloud storage.
• Leverage in house data (audio, visual, motion capture) to fine tune large scale models for improved performance on manufacturing, assembly, and maintenance tasks.
• Provide regular communication and feedback to the team regarding progress, setbacks, and new research opportunities.
• Contribute to a collaborative team environment by engaging in creative discussions with members working in related areas, with opportunities to engage in research areas such as robotics, advanced manufacturing, and AI-guided design optimization.
• Participate in the academic community by writing papers, giving seminars, and leading workshops.
• Ensure compliance of human subject’s research with approved Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved protocols.

 Requirement Qualifications:

•  US Citizenship is required.
•  Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, or related field.
•  Self-motivation, ability to work cooperatively in diverse teams, and flexibility for evolving program objectives.
•  Experience with multi-modal AI models.
•  Experience with common programming languages/packages such as Python, Matlab, TensorFlow/Pytorch, OpenCV, etc.

Preferred Qualifications:

•  Experience with high performance, cloud, and/or GPU computing
•  Experience with robotics hardware and/or simulation such as ROS, Gazebo, etc.