Custom radio link and software for low-latency remote driving
Background
Eira Systems is a Swedish start-up developing electrically powered unmanned ground vehicles for logistics, CASEVAC and other supporting missions in demanding off-road environments. Eira has developed and tested the full-scale Eira-X prototype and has now received a contract to develop the framework for a second-generation platform together with a major Swedish defence actor. Eira is based at The Yard in Lindholmen, Gothenburg.
To enable unmanned operations, autonomy is needed. Eira is developing both driver-assist features that make remote-controlled operation more reliable and point-to-point autonomous navigation.
Remote driving in hard conditions is almost as difficult to get right as autonomy. The operator drives from video, so every frozen frame and every bit of extra delay makes the vehicle harder to control. Eira-X already drives over cellular and Starlink, but cellular coverage can be thin off-road, Starlink needs open sky, and both depend on infrastructure we do not control. Deep inside some buildings, for example, there is neither, so a radio link of our own is needed.
Goal description
The goal is to build a prototype of our own radio link that carries both control and video, or to research one or more parts of the glass-to-glass pipeline, from camera through encoding and radio to the display.
Topics
Building a working prototype sender and receiver is of course enough for a thesis. The work must build something, in software or hardware. You can also choose a more advanced direction, and your own ideas are welcome. Some examples:
- UAV as a relay station
- Learning-based methods in the glass-to-glass pipeline, e.g. learned adaptive bitrate
- Link bonding with cellular and Starlink
Our vehicle has stereo and thermal cameras, IMUs, wheel odometry, an Ouster lidar and an Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin. We also have a 1/10-scale vehicle with a similar sensor and compute setup.
Want to know more about how you could attack these topics? Reach out to us! We would love to support you in exploring your own ideas in a related topic. We also have a few more experimental topics if you want something even more challenging, as well as thesis proposals in other areas.
Student background
We are looking for students who are passionate about radio, embedded systems, autonomous ground vehicles or physical AI in general. You only need to be ambitious and curious to apply. Applicants must, however, be citizens of a NATO or EU member state. We assess applications on the following, in order of priority (attaching something for one of them is enough):
- Projects (school or hobby) in a related area
- Your personality and motivation for this project
- Merits
- Knowledge (your bachelor’s and master’s programmes, and relevant courses)
Apply preferably before November 1st to andreas.munck@eirasystems.com