Principal Robotics AI Engineer (Perception & Autonomy Systems)

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.