Role

Want to help make the process of building robots easier for everyone involved? Our ROS developer advocate is looking for a student to help improve the process of adding ROS support to hardware. Potential students will work at the intersection of technical communication and robotics development to help produce content for the ROS community. This work will help hardware manufacturers produce products that support ROS out of the box and improve the overall developer experience.

How your work moves the mission forward

• Intrinsic’s mission is to democratize the world of robotics. To do this robot application developers need to focus on the big picture and waste less time integrating new hardware components into their robot. This summer we’re hoping to make more robotics hardware plug-and-play and grow the ROS hardware ecosystem!
• The technical documents, websites, and guides the candidate produces will be read by and influence thousands of robotics professionals across the globe, and help set standards for how things like LIDARS, cameras, and radars interface with ROS systems.  
• The student will work with their mentor to build a comprehensive list of robots, and robot components available to ROS developers. The student will then collaborate with these organizations to better understand industry best practices for hardware support in robotic applications.
• Building on their research the student will produce a number of technical guides, websites, and potentially ROS Extension Proposals (REPs) that outline the best practices for robot hardware developers.  
• The student will work with their mentor to develop skills in community management and developer communication to present their works to the broader ROS community. 

Skills you will need to be successful

• This role is open to rising third and fourth year undergraduates and graduate students in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, and related fields.
• The student should have a moderate amount of experience using ROS (Robot Operating System), preferably ROS 2. The student will be documenting key parts of the ROS development process, so the ability to learn a process or technique and then communicate that process will be of the utmost importance. 
• The student must have experience with Linux, Python, shell scripting, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The student should be able to create a new HTML website and lightly style it with CSS and JavaScript. We’re not looking for a designer, but someone who can create a well formatted document. The student will also be collecting data and analyzing it to make decisions, so familiarity with Python libraries like Numpy and Pandas is a big plus!
• Experience with code documentation and testing techniques is a big plus! The student will be producing Markdown and Restructured Text documents on a regular basis. We would love to see documentation that you have produced in the past.
• The student MUST be fluent in both written and spoken English with a strong emphasis on technical communication. Fluency or proficiency in a foreign language is a big plus. If you’ve written a technical document or blog post we would love to read it!