1x

Staff Firmware Engineer - Motor Controls

San Carlos, CA. Posted 5 months ago

The role

You will own the motor control firmware for the NEO humanoid robot joints. This involves developing control loops, integrating sensors, and building fault detection to ensure safe and smooth motion.

What you will do

  • Develop motor control firmware for BLDC/PMSM actuators
  • Integrate and calibrate position sensing
  • Tune control loops for high bandwidth and low noise
  • Implement torque and impedance control modes
  • Build fault detection and protection
  • Design motor drive communication with deterministic timing
  • Bring up new motor driver boards and support hardware design reviews
  • Test and validate firmware releases on the bench and on full robots
  • Build tools for automated tuning, logging and regression testing

Required qualifications

  • 5+ years of embedded firmware development in C/C++
  • Shipped motor control firmware for BLDC or PMSM motors, including FOC and cascaded control loops
  • Solid grasp of motor physics and power electronics: inverters, gate drivers, current sensing, dead time and PWM
  • Experience with encoders and sensor interfaces such as SPI, BiSS-C, SSI or ABZ
  • Hands-on experience with EtherCAT/CAN or another real-time fieldbus
  • Comfort with interrupt-driven, hard real-time code on MCUs such as STM32, TI C2000 or similar
  • Hardware debugging with oscilloscopes, current probes, logic analyzers and dynamometers

Nice to have

  • Experience with robotic joints, quasi-direct-drive or high-ratio geared actuators
  • Background in sensorless control, field weakening or motor parameter identification
  • Experience with EtherCAT or CAN FD at high update rates (1 kHz and above)
  • Experience with safety-critical systems or standards such as IEC 61508, ISO 13849 or ISO 26262, including functional safety concepts like STO
  • Familiarity with a real-time OS such as FreeRTOS, SafeRTOS or Zephyr
  • Modeling and simulation in MATLAB/Simulink or Python for controller design
  • Robotics or autonomous systems background

Benefits

  • Health, dental, and vision insurance
  • 401(k) with company match
  • Paid time off and holidays

About the company

1X builds humanoid robots that work in homes to handle chores and tasks. They are developing NEO, a flagship home robot designed to operate in the real world alongside people.