Doctoral Fellowship
Enter the fascinating world of the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and help shape the future through research and innovation! We offer an exciting and inspiring working environment driven by the expertise and curiosity of our 11,000 employees from 100 nations and our unique infrastructure. Together, we develop sustainable technologies and thus contribute to finding solutions to global challenges. Would you like to join us in addressing this major future challenge? Then this is your place!
Our Institute of Communications and Navigation in Oberpfaffenhofen offers a
DLR-DAAD Doctoral Fellowship
Nr. 723: Activity Recognition for Foot-Mounted Inertial Sensors
What to expect:
The Institute of Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) develops pedestrian indoor/outdoor multimodal navigation techniques. Beside techniques that are foreseen for mass market applications, techniques that are especially designed for first responders have to fulfil specific requirements: The localization has to be accurate in every situation and has to work for different movements of first responders including jumps, crawling and running. DLR has
already developed a pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) solution called NavShoe, which is based on inertial measurements from a sensor located on the foot. In combination with a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approach, called FootSLAM, this system is capable of estimating a pedestrian’s position in GNSS-denied environments.
The aim of this fellowship is to improve the system in order to cope with requirements of professional users such as first responders: Localization shall also work for different movement patterns like low and high crawling, climbing, running, climbing a ladder, climbing stairs, and lying on the ground. These movement patterns shall be reliably recognized with appropriate activity recognition techniques (e.g. with machine learning techniques) locally on the edge device. Second, the algorithms
shall be adapted to these movement patterns. The localization performance shall be tested and verified in realistic environments.
Please apply here: DLR-DAAD Research Fellowship Programme – DAAD – Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst
Further information and current vacancies:
What we expect from you:
- MSc. or Diploma in Electrical Engineering or equivalent
- theoretical and practical background in machine learning
- programming skills in Java, Python, and C, C++
- experience with Linux OS, Windows, Android
- theoretical background in signal processing, estimation theory and machine learning
- experience with experimental hardware platforms, e.g. Raspberry PI or Arduino
What we offer:
DLR stands for diversity, appreciation and equality for all people. We promote independent work and the individual development of our employees both personally and professionally. To this end, we offer numerous training and development opportunities. Equal opportunities are of particular importance to us, which is why we want to increase the proportion of women in science and management in particular. Applicants with severe disabilities will be given preference if they are qualified.
Further information:
Starting date: November 2025
Type of employment: Full-time
Contact:
Christian Gentner
Email: Christian.Gentner@dlr.de
