Are you passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology and shaping the future of mobile autonomous systems, such as robots and self-driving vehicles? We are seeking highly motivated and experienced Senior Researchers (post-doc or equivalent industry experience) in Sensor Fusion to join our dynamic team. You will be working on developing novel concepts and algorithms and demonstrate these in industrially relevant applications (TRL6).

Topic

Sensor fusion combines features extracted from different modalities to create a coherent and rich understanding of scene. As the perceptive system output integrates in the control loop of autonomous systems, robustness, power consumption and real-time processing are key design requirements.

Mobile autonomous systems, such as AGVs and self-driving vehicles, need to operate in situations with very diverse complexity (light levels, other actors). Depending on the context, one sensor modality may be more reliable or informative than another. Maintaining robust and accurate sensor fusion under any circumstance requires continuous adaptation of the modality-specific feature extraction pipelines as well as the intermodal information exchange.

In your research, you will explore active sensing concepts and demonstrate this on next-generation imec hardware (SWIR, radar, lidar). As you will be embedded in a team, the topic of study can be discussed but will be situated in one of the following domains: adaptive computation techniques for neural networks, hierarchical fusion models allowing for designing feedback loops with intermediate features, context estimation techniques to determine the informative value of each sensor modality in the current situation, and building world models for use in control loops.

Role and responsibilities

You will be integrated in team of researchers working on sensor fusion. Your focus will be on algorithmic work and developing higher TRL demonstrators on the imec hardware. You are supported by a team setting up compute infrastructure and data collection.

Your responsibilities:

• Designing, prototyping and optimizing adaptive sensor fusion algorithms integrating cutting-edge modalities (SWIR, radar, RGB and LIDAR)
• Conducting in-depth research to stay at the forefront of sensor fusion algorithms and adapting them to real-world applications
• Developing demonstrators of your research
• Day-to-day interaction with a multidisciplinary and international team of colleagues working on a jointly defined research roadmap, thereby ensuring ownership and timely delivery of your research results realizing a jointly defined research roadmap
• Identifying and scoping promising research topics for novel PhD students, in collaboration with the Principal Investigators

Candidate profile

• You are a senior researcher, with proven academic or corporate research experience in the domain of sensor fusion. You have a PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics or – equivalently - have conducted several years of research in corporate R&D environment.
• You have worked with one or more of the targeted sensing modalities: SWIR, LiDAR, radar.
• You have experience with novel algorithmic design that goes beyond the mere implementation of methods from literature.
• You have experience in developing and deploying sensor fusion algorithms in real-world scenarios.
• You are proficient in Python programming.
• You thrive on combining fundamental research with hands-on implementation work.

Our offer

We offer you the opportunity to work within the vibrating research environment of imec, which has worldwide recognition for its nanotechnology developments and its chip and system design capabilities. You will work within a team of multidisciplinary imec experts. The work location is in Ghent, a city referred to as “Belgium’s Best Kept Secret” by the Lonely Planet.

The salary is competitive and will be determined in correspondence with your experience and seniority.

How to apply

Please submit your application by email to pieter.simoens@ugent.be, including a cover letter motivating your application and highlighting your excellence, your CV and a list of publications/patents.

We do not work with application deadlines: incoming applications will be screen on a short-term and the position will remain open until a suitable candidate is found. We have multiple positions open.