As robotics engineer you will develop ‘autonomy’ for unmanned systems. This can mean localisation algorithms, route planning or simulation environments; or real-time analysis of camera images to determine where a vehicle can travel safely. Apart from this navigational autonomy, also the “high level” tactical behaviour of a vehicle can be made more autonomous. This vehicle could be a small scout robot, but also a larger vehicle that has to navigate autonomously, or even small drones that are controlled from a vehicle.

 You will become part of a team that works on all those aspects of autonomy in various projects. That means working with modern algorithms and software, sometimes straight from scientific publications, applied on real systems. The team works on things like:

·        Developing simulation environments (for example in Unity)

o   World generation

o   Sensor simulation (LiDAR, GPS, depth camera, IMU, …)

·        Implementing and configuring autonomous navigation techniques such as

o   Visual or LiDAR odometry

o   SLAM

o   Route planning

o   Scene segmentation

·        Development of autonomous tactical behaviour, for example using

o   Behaviour trees

o   Deep Reinforcement Learning

In some projects we develop a simulator; in other projects we integrate algorithms on real unmanned vehicles of several types. Demcon also has two testing robots (indoor and outdoor rovers) for development and testing of autonomous functions.