Staff Robotics Control Engineer - Whole-Body Control (Wheeled Platform)

Job description

Here at Humanoid, we believe in a future where robots amplify human potential. That’s why we’ve set out on a mission to build the world’s most capable, commercially-scalable, and safe humanoid robots. We’re bringing that mission to life with HMND‑01 Alpha - our rapidly developed humanoid platform now running in real industrial pilots - and we’re growing the team to take it even further. # About the Role We are looking for a **Staff Robotics Control Engineer** to join our **Control Team** in London and **lead the evolution of whole-body control for our Wheeled Alpha platform** - a humanoid whose whole body spans a wheeled base, torso and two arms, controlled as one coordinated system. We need genuine depth in **classical whole-body control**. You should know **hierarchical and weighted QP** formulations from the inside - not as a library you have called, but as something you have derived, implemented, tuned, profiled and debugged on real hardware under demo pressure. You should have opinions about strict hierarchies versus soft-weighted stacks, regularisation and nullspace behaviour, what to do when a task set becomes infeasible, and how to keep a redundant system clear of singularities without it feeling sluggish. Alongside that depth, you will set technical direction and mentor a strong team of control engineers. # What You'll Do **Whole-Body Control Architecture & Algorithms:** - Lead the evolution of the Wheeled Alpha whole-body controller: task formulation, prioritisation, weighting, constraint handling and solver selection. - Coordinate wheeled base, torso and dual-arm motion within a single whole-body formulation, with base motion that tracks commanded targets accurately and stays well-behaved under aggressive commands and long-duration operation. - Own the constraint layer - self-collision avoidance, joint and velocity limit guarding, and singularity handling - plus feasibility handling and recovery when the solver fails. - Drive the evolution toward predictive formulations: evaluate and develop MPC-based whole-body control where anticipating dynamics and constraints outperforms instantaneous QP resolution. **Dynamics, Compliance & Payload:** - Own the dynamic models the controller runs on - inertial, gravity and friction modelling, system identification, and online payload estimation - so the robot knows what it is carrying and controls accordingly. - Advance compliance and force behaviour - impedance, admittance and force control that stays compliant at contact - and extend payload capability without sacrificing either. - Own stability-aware behaviour under changing payload and dynamic motion **Safety Integration:** - Make whole-body control a first-class citizen of the safety architecture: the controller must accept and honour requests from dedicated safety compute - velocity capping, controlled deceleration, constrained operating envelopes - provably and without degrading motion quality. - Co-own the controls-to-safety interface with the safety team, and design control behaviour so that safety interventions are graceful rather than abrupt. **Technical Leadership:** - Define the performance metrics for whole-body control and insist on deterministic, reproducible evaluation of every change, in simulation and on hardware. - Mentor control engineers on optimisation-based control, numerical robustness and hardware debugging; act as reviewer of record for the most consequential changes. - Work with hardware teams so control constraints and mechanical design decisions stay coherent. # What We're Looking For - Deep, demonstrable expertise in optimisation-based whole-body control: hierarchical and weighted QP formulations, task prioritisation, constraint handling, and the numerical realities of solving them inside a real-time loop. - Strong command of the classical WBC toolkit - operational space and task-space control, inverse dynamics and IK formulations, redundancy resolution, nullspace projection, impedance and admittance control, contact and force control - and working knowledge of MPC formulations for whole-body or mobile-manipulation control. - Deployed whole-body controllers on real high-DoF hardware (humanoids, mobile manipulators, dual-arm or legged platforms), including coordinating base and manipulator motion. - Practical fluency with QP/NLP solvers and their failure modes: conditioning, infeasibility, warm starting, solve-time budgets, and what to do at the limit. - Strong dynamic modelling foundations: rigid body kinematics/dynamics (Jacobians, dynamics formulations, URDF-based modelling), inertial and friction system identification, and payload/external-load estimation. - Expert modern C++ for real-time control with Python for analysis and prototyping. - Track record of taking control algorithms to production reliability rather than to a paper or a one-off demo, plus demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring. # What We Offer - Competitive equity: stock options with meaningful upside as we scale. - 30+ paid days off, including 23 days of annual leave, all UK bank holidays, and additional company closure days (including Christmas–New Year shutdown). - Private healthcare, including virtual and in-person care. - Pension scheme with 8% total contribution (5% employee, 3% employer) on full earnings. - Free daily breakfast, catered lunch, and snacks in-office. - Work at the frontier - collaborate daily with world-class engineers, researchers, and product experts building the next generation of AI and humanoid robotics. - Real ownership - direct access to founding leadership, meaningful input on product direction, and the ability to drive key initiatives from day one.