Data Scientist - Robotics

Overview

At PNNL, our core capabilities are divided among major departments that we refer to as Directorates within the Lab, focused on a specific area of scientific research or other function, with its own leadership team and dedicated budget.

Our Science & Technology directorates include National Security, Earth and Biological Sciences, Physical and Computational Sciences, and Energy and Environment.

In addition, we have an Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy, Office of Science user facility housed on the PNNL campus.

The Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate's (PCSD’s) strengths in experimental, computational, and theoretical chemistry and materials science, together with our advanced computing, applied mathematics and data science capabilities, are central to the discovery mission we embrace  our most important resource is our people—experts across the range of scientific disciplines who team together to take on the biggest scientific challenges of our time.

The Advanced Computing, Mathematics, and Data Division (ACMDD) focuses on basic and applied computing research encompassing artificial intelligence, applied mathematics, computing technologies, and data and computational engineering. Our scientists and engineers apply end‑to‑end co‑design principles to advance future energy‑efficient computing systems and design the next generation of algorithms to analyze, model, understand, and control the behavior of complex systems in science, energy, and national security.

The Data Sciences and Machine Intelligence Group in ACMDD at PNNL seeks a Data Scientist to join the group to lead and support scientific research in robotics, autonomous systems, and intelligent control. This is an excellent opportunity to contribute to cutting‑edge research in robotic autonomy, learning‑enabled control, and embodied AI. You will join a multi‑disciplinary team advancing scientific discovery through intelligent systems and autonomous laboratories, while helping develop new capabilities in optimization, machine learning, and integration.

The primary focus of this senior scientist position will be to grow existing, and adding new, capabilities in the areas of Optimization, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, and to help strengthen the group’s leadership in data science and machine intelligence fields. A successful candidate should have shown significant national‑level expertise in one or more of the following technical areas:
Design and integration of robotics systems, optimization and optimization‑based decision‑making, artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomous control and decision systems, model predictive control, reinforcement learning algorithms, deploying machine learning using cloud and edge computing solutions, transformer architectures for time series analysis.

As a researcher in robotics and autonomous systems at PNNL, you will contribute to the development of intelligent, integrated robotic platforms for scientific applications such as autonomous laboratories. Your work will support PNNL’s mission to accelerate scientific discovery through automation, modeling, and machine intelligence. You will contribute to software development and applied mathematics research in robotics for scientific applications such as autonomous laboratories.

The emphasis will be given to modeling, simulation, system integration, and control of heterogeneous robotics systems and multi‑agent systems.

You will develop and apply advanced algorithms for motion planning, learning‑enabled control, and autonomous decision‑making using techniques such as model predictive control (MPC), control barrier functions (CBFs), differentiable predictive control, and reinforcement learning. You will also explore cutting‑edge topics such as robotic manipulation, Sim2

Real transfer, vision‑language‑action models, and foundation models for robotics, helping to drive robust task learning and generalization across physical and simulated platforms. A key part of your role will involve contributing to high‑quality software development, including the use of physics‑based simulators…