About the role#
Palona AI is building the operational intelligence layer for Physical AI. We treat interactions as a primary perception target to enable agentic systems that understand physical events and deploy timely, proactive responses. We are now extending these capabilities into a closed-loop robotic system covering perception, planning, execution, and monitoring. This internship focuses on research and pre-production experiments that connect our interaction models with real robots in dynamic environments like restaurants and healthcare.
What you'll do#
- Extend interaction understanding models to support real-time robotic deployment decisions.
- Build closed-loop systems that connect perception, planning, robot execution, monitoring, and replanning.
- Develop methods for deciding when, where, and how a robot acts based on physical events and context.
- Integrate and program real robotic platforms for research and pre-production experiments.
- Monitor robot execution to detect failures and trigger rapid replanning.
- Design experiments for robotics tasks in restaurant and healthcare settings.
- Evaluate system robustness across changes in actors, objects, locations, and environmental conditions.
- Explore how interaction-centric representations support reliable robot behavior.
- Contribute to research publications, prototypes, and system innovations.
What you'll need#
- Current pursuit of a PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, AI, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related field.
- Strong hands-on experience programming, training, integrating, and debugging real robots.
- Familiarity with robotic perception, planning, control, or embodied AI systems.
- Strong software engineering skills, preferably in Python and C++.
- Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Ability to move fluidly between research ideas and working physical systems.
- Experience with ROS or ROS2, simulation environments, motion planning, or robotic middleware.
- Experience with vision-language models, video understanding, interaction recognition, or robot learning.
- Experience deploying models or robotics systems outside of simulated settings.
- Publications at top AI, computer vision, or robotics venues.
- Background in healthcare, assistive robotics, hospital operations, or clinical environments.
- Experience working with limited, noisy, or weakly supervised data.
Location & details#
- Location: Los Altos, California, United States.
- Modality: On-site.
- Employment: Full-time paid internship.
- Term: Rolling.
About Palona AI
Palona AI develops proprietary artificial intelligence systems that integrate multi-agent and multimodal models. The company focuses on automation and customer experience tools for business operations. Founded in 2024, it maintains a team of 31 employees. The firm operates out of its headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
How to get in at Palona AI
Applying to Palona AI early gives you a distinct advantage because recruiters review applications as they arrive before the candidate pool becomes unmanageable. Intern Insider sends an instant alert the moment a role matching your target is published, helping you apply among the first. Getting your resume in front of a human early is a practical way to stand out in a competitive cycle. You can also improve your response rates by reaching out to the recruiters behind the company roles directly. Intern Insider surfaces the specific recruiters for Palona AI so you can ask about the role or a referral. This direct approach often beats waiting for a response from a general application queue.
