Automation & Control Engineer

Automation & Control Engineer

Role mission

Own the motion intelligence layer — the kinematics, dynamics, and control code that turn perception into safe, precise physical action. This is the role closest to the hardware and the role on which deployment reliability ultimately rests.

Key responsibilities

• Design motion sequences for the programs task library (Grasp-Turn-Pull for door operations, cassette handoff, bag manipulation, replenishment patterns).
• Implement force and torque control for delicate tasks where pure position control is insufficient.
• Optimise gait, balance, and stability during heavy lifting and dynamic carrying for bipedal platforms.
• Build the motion-primitive library and Action Library that higher-level planners call into.
• Develop dexterous-hand grasping strategies appropriate to the programs object catalogue.
• Maintain the kinematic and dynamic models of the deployed platforms and update them as hardware revisions land.
• Lead the safety case for live deployments in collaboration with RIL plant safety.

Required experience

• 8+ years in robotics motion control, with deep hands-on knowledge of kinematics, dynamics, and inverse/forward kinematics (IK/FK).
• Production experience with MoveIt2 or an equivalent motion planning library.
• Familiarity with motor control protocols (CAN, EtherCAT) at the implementation level — can debug an EtherCAT bus, not just use a vendor SDK.
• Force/torque control implementation experience for at least one production application.
• Has shipped a motion-control stack in a manufacturing or logistics setting that ran at production cadence.

Preferred experience

• Experience with bipedal locomotion control (whole-body MPC, ZMP-based balance, or learned policies).
• Background in dexterous manipulation research or deployment (multi-fingered hands, in-hand manipulation).
• Exposure to functional-safety design and the safety-case construction for collaborative or mobile robots.
• Familiarity with ros2_control hardware abstraction layer and writing custom controllers.