Locomotion & Whole-Body Control Engineer (Mensch)

The role

This role involves developing locomotion and whole-body control for quadruped robots. You will work on trajectory optimization, MPC, and QP-based whole-body control for real-time execution on physical hardware.

What you will do

• Whole-body movement generation and control for floating-base legged platforms
• Trajectory optimization and Model-Predictive-Control pipelines
• QP-based task-space inverse dynamics for real-time execution at 1 kHz
• Whole-body modeling of the platform including rigid-body dynamics
• Constraint formulation across MPC and QP levels
• Solver performance work including warm-starting and numerical conditioning
• Deployment, tuning, and debugging of pipelines on physical robots
• High-performance C++ development and Python tooling

Required qualifications

• MSc or PhD in Robotik, Regelungstechnik, Maschinenbau, Elektrotechnik, Informatik or a related field
• 4+ years hands-on experience in developing trajectory optimization, MPC for locomotion and/or Whole-Body-Control on physical robots
• Solid foundations in Floating-Base-Rigid-Body-Dynamik and contact modeling
• Practical knowledge of reduced locomotion models (LIPM, SRBD, centroidal dynamics or equivalents) and their use in MPC
• Strong background 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
• Experience deploying real-time control, MPC and WBC pipelines at 500 Hz to 1 kHz on hardware
• Very good C++ for real-time robotics software
• Python for analysis, tooling, prototyping and debugging
• Practical understanding of contact dynamics, actuator limits, latency, state estimation errors, solver failure modes and model deviations on real hardware
• Collaborative working style

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with humanoids, quadrupeds or other high-DOF legged robots
• Familiarity with Pinocchio, MuJoCo, Crocoddyl, IPOPT, TSID, OCS2 or similar open-source tools
• Hierarchical QPs, weighted QPs, 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 contacts, bimanual grasping or base-arm coordination
• Contact-consistent dynamics and impact-aware transitions in control
• Experience with torque-controlled robots and high-bandwidth electrical actuation
• Publications on RSS, ICRA, IROS or CoRL in the field of Legged Locomotion or Whole-Body-Control

About the company

neura-robotics-gmbh is building out its legged-robotics competence on NEURAs quadrupeds.