The Institute of Flight Systems Engineering in Braunschweig operates and researches a wide range of different unmanned aircraft. As part of a dynamic and dedicated team of researchers, you will investigate and develop methods for the on-board decision-making and autonomy of unmanned multicopters, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. With the team, you will pursue the vision of enabling increasingly complex missions of drones, from humanitarian aid to inspection and reconnaissance tasks to wounded transport in crisis areas.

The methods you research contribute to the use of unmanned aircraft in complex environments. You develop models and abstraction layers for missions and tasks of unmanned aircraft and develop algorithms to perform them automatically. In this context you approach the high safety requirements of aviation and apply methods from the fields of machine learning, knowledge-based methods and symbolic artificial intelligence. You will implement your ideas and approaches using various openly available libraries (e.g. boost, ROS, ompl, tensorflow, pytorch) with the help of different high-level languages such as C/C++, Python or Matlab/Simulink. Your task is complemented by embedding your developments in the safety-critical applications of aviation. As an example, formal methods and the verification and validation of the procedures with reference to industry standards are applied.

For the development of technology demonstrators for chosen on-board decision systems, you will face both exciting, practical and theoretical challenges. In simulation environments and on flight test carriers, you can test your developments in a practical and systemic way. By publishing your scientific results, you will provide an important contribution to topics such as mission and motion planning, application-driven trajectory optimization as well as tactical and game-theoretical decision problems. We support ambitions towards achieving a Ph.D.