Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer (human)

The role

This role involves developing legged-robotics capabilities on humanoid quadruped platforms. You will work on trajectory optimization, MPC, and QP-based whole-body control for real-time execution on physical robots.

What you will do

• Whole-body motion generation and control for floating-base legged platforms
• Trajectory optimization and model-predictive control pipelines
• QP-based task-space inverse dynamics for executing whole-body control at 1 kHz
• Whole-body modelling for the platform
• Constraint formulation across the MPC and QP layers
• Solver performance work including warm-starting and numerical conditioning
• Deployment, tuning, and debugging of pipelines on physical robots
• High-performance C++ for real-time execution and Python tooling for analysis

Required qualifications

• MSc or PhD in robotics, controls, mechanical or electrical engineering, computer science, or a related field
• 4+ years of hands-on experience developing trajectory optimization, MPC for locomotion, and / or whole-body control on physical robots
• Strong foundation in floating-base articulated rigid-body dynamics and contact modelling
• Strong working knowledge of reduced-order locomotion models (LIPM, SRBD, centroidal dynamics, or equivalents) and their use inside MPC
• Strong foundation in optimal control, constrained numerical optimization, and model-predictive control for legged robots
• Hands-on experience with whole-body QP / TSID frameworks on real robot data
• Hands-on experience deploying real-time control / MPC / WBC pipelines at 500 Hz – 1 kHz on hardware
• Strong C++ for real-time robotics software
• Python for analysis, tooling, prototyping, and debugging
• Practical understanding of contact dynamics, actuator limits, latency, state-estimation error, solver failure modes, and model mismatch on real hardware
• Collaborative working style

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience on humanoids, quadrupeds, or other high-DOF legged robots
• Familiarity with Pinocchio, MuJoCo, Crocoddyl, IPOPT, TSID, OCS2, or similar open-source tools
• Hierarchical QP, weighted QP, task prioritization, contact force optimization, or operational-space control
• Contact planning, gait optimization, balance recovery; CPG-based or hybrid CPG / MPC controllers
• Multi-contact WBC: foot contact, bimanual grasping, or base-arm coordination
• Contact-consistent dynamics and impact-aware control transitions
• Experience with torque-controlled robots and high-bandwidth electric actuation
• Publications at RSS, ICRA, IROS, or CoRL in legged locomotion or whole-body control

About the company

neura-robotics-gmbh is growing its legged-robotics capability on NEURA's humanoid quadruped platforms.