Robotics Simulation Engineer – Navigation & Perception

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is a publicly funded research institute, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It is home to a diverse community of leading scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and researchers from across the globe, transforming problems and roadblocks into pioneering research and technology prototypes that help move society ahead.

Autonomous Robotics Research Centre

Unmanned vehicles in space, in the air, on land, on sea, and underwater offer exciting opportunities to dramatically improve safety, environmental protection and operational effectiveness – at lower cost – in both industrial and mission-critical settings.

Our research focus includes:

• UAV research and development, covering platforms, real-time operating systems, perception and communication algorithms, control, and decision-making algorithms
• Autonomous marine and submarine vehicles research and development for different use cases
• Autonomous ground vehicle research and development for on road and off-road use cases
• Swarm architectures for heterogeneous drones and advanced communication networks
• Low-power platforms for nano-size and pico-size UAV classes
• Bio-inspired, evolutionary, and self-organized methodologies

We are looking for a Software Engineer to join us to help implement and maintain our simulation capabilities for fixed wing aircraft navigation. We are exploring photorealistic COTS simulators with rosbridge support as environments in which we want to integrate our developed autonomy stack. You will be directly reporting to the project lead.

Tasks related to the job:

• integration of existing simulation components (including photorealistic digital twins and flight controlers), sensor models, COTS satellite imagery, and of our navigation stack into a virtual Software in the Loop (SITL) package
• the SITL package shall execute a given flight scenario within pre-defined environmental conditions
• provide clear engineering feedback to i. the algorithm R&D and deployment teams and to ii. senior management in order to facilitate trade-off conclusions
• work with the above teams to engineer novel ways of testing and evaluating of our algorithms, including for edge cases and rare/abnormal events
• challenge status quo and proactively advocate for better choices of simulation components – both in terms of photorealism and ease of integration
• work with contractors to develop new features in order to reduce the sim2real gap and improve the fidelity of our simulation results
• prepare demonstrations of simulated flight scenarios to the marketing department and to our clients

Required qualifications and skills

• Strong technical background (BS, MS, PhD or equivalent professional experience) in Computer Science or a closely related engineering field
• Strong programming background in C/C++ 14 (at least 2 years of experience writing production-level C++ code)
• write maintainable, clear, and concise code
• Experience using ROS
• Experience with one or more of the following:

1. Microsoft AirSim, Xplane 12, Isaac Sim, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
2. sensors (camera/radar/lidar) integration in one of the above
3. QGroundControl or similar
4. Simulation of rotory/fixed wing drones

• relative to the previous point - proven record / demonstration of an implemented flight scenario
• Experience with modern DevOps (especially Docker)
• rigor and a testing-oriented mentality
• agile attitude

Nice to have

• Having integrated custom ROS packages on ROS Bridge with a simulator
• Practical experience in Robotics and Computer vision with emphasis on localization (perception-vision), state estimation and control
• Understanding of a navigation stack (e.g. https://docs.nav2.org/)Understanding of basic photogrammetry (FoV, focal length/lenses, resolution) and camera calibration procedure
• Understanding of network inferencing for object detection and tracking (e.g. Yolo), classification and segmentation (e.g. MobileNet)
• Experience with modern DevOps (especially Docker)
• An interest in defining evaluation strategies in simulation

At TII, we help society to overcome its biggest hurdles through a rigorous approach to scientific discovery and inquiry, using state-of-the-art facilities and collaboration with leading international institutions. Our rigorous discovery and inquiry-based approach helps to forge new and disruptive breakthroughs in advanced materials, autonomous robotics, cryptography, digital security, directed energy, quantum computing and secure systems.