6 Robotics and Reinforcement Learning PhD Positions (2026)
Looking for robotics and reinforcement learning PhD positions? Below are 6 professors who looked to be actively recruiting PhD and postdoc researchers as of July 12, 2026, covering deep reinforcement learning, robot perception, agile control and embodied agent learning. Every one was surfaced with the ApexApply search and then checked by hand against their own page.
This is one in an occasional series of hand-checked position roundups, grouped by research area. Checked as of July 12, 2026.
| Professor | University | Research focus | Positions | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun Jin | University of Alberta | Continual RL, embodied AI, and open-ended agent learning | PhD and postdocs | Profile |
| Pieter Abbeel | UC Berkeley | Deep reinforcement learning and robot learning | PhD and postdocs | Profile |
| Davide Scaramuzza | University of Zurich | RL, perception, and computer vision for agile robotics | PhD and postdocs | Profile |
| Guanya Shi | Carnegie Mellon University | Reinforcement learning and control theory for robotics | PhD and postdocs | Profile |
| Abhinav Valada | University of Freiburg | Open-world robot learning and perception for autonomous systems | PhD and postdocs | Profile |
| Zongqing Lu | Peking University | Reinforcement learning, general agents, and embodied intelligence | PhD and postdocs | Profile |
How to use this list of robotics and reinforcement learning positions
A name here is a starting point, not a guarantee. Recruiting plans shift through the cycle: funding falls through, a slot fills, a professor goes on leave. So before you invest in a tailored email, confirm the signals yourself. Our guide on how to tell if a professor is actually accepting students walks through reading those signals, and how to email a professor covers the outreach itself.
Find PhD positions in your own field
This edition is robotics and reinforcement learning because that is what we checked this week. Your field is almost certainly different, and that is the point: you can run the same search for your own interests, in any discipline, and get a ranked set of best-fit professors worldwide in a few minutes with ApexApply.