Principal Robotics AI Engineer (Perception & Autonomy Systems) - Part-Time

Perception & Scene Understanding

• 3D Scene Understanding: Build and ship the perception pipeline across the lab's platforms: object detection, instance segmentation, terrain classification, traversability estimation. Real-time C++ on edge compute, with clean interfaces to downstream mapping, planning, and control.
  
• Terrain Perception and Traversability: Own the terrain understanding layer: elevation mapping, traversability scoring, and the integration of classical geometric methods with learned approaches (foundation-model features, self-supervised traversability). Different platforms have different mobility envelopes; the traversability layer must account for this.
  
• Cooperative Perception: Drive the lab's multi-robot cooperative perception work: shared scene representations, distributed inference, bandwidth-aware feature sharing across heterogeneous platforms. This is a core research direction with our academic partners.
  
• Multi-Sensor Fusion and Calibration: Integrate perception across different sensor configurations (RGB-D, thermal, fisheye, LiDAR and IMU) and different platforms. Produce equivalent, reliable scene representations regardless of the sensor payload. Own the multi-sensor calibration pipeline: intrinsics, extrinsics management across platform changes, and time synchronisation.
  

Wider Scope

• Programme Delivery Support: Provide C++ systems depth for real-time autonomy stacks across programme delivery, particularly where perception, sensor fusion, or edge compute performance are the bottleneck.
  
• Academic Partnership: Serve as the lab's technical counterpart for cooperative perception research collaborations.