← Master's thesis
Project · Autonomy

Off-road autonomy solutions: UAV-assisted navigation, trailer reversing and winch recovery

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.

Unmanned operations need autonomy. Eira is developing driver-assist features that make remote-controlled operation more reliable, as well as autonomous functions for tasks that are hard to do remotely.

The three topics below are tasks our operators face when driving a UGV remotely. Reversing with a trailer is hard enough on a road, and harder off-road. A stuck UGV should recover itself, choosing how to winch and drive out, and ideally anchor itself without anyone on the ground. A UAV extends what the UGV can see. These tasks need to be solved before a UGV can operate fully autonomously off-road.

Goal description

The goal is to take one of the hard tasks a UGV faces off-road and make it autonomous or semi-autonomous. You will work on one of the three topics below, from method through to a test on our vehicles.

Topics

  1. UAV-assisted UGV navigation
    • Collaborative V-SLAM between the UAV and the UGV.
  2. Autonomous reversing with a trailer
  3. Towards autonomous winch recovery
    • Manual attachment to an anchor point, with hand-signal control
    • An interface for VLM-based decision-making
    • Self-anchoring, with no one on the ground, for example a ground anchor the vehicle sets itself

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 autonomous ground vehicles, off-road driving, self-driving 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 (attach something for at least one of them):

  1. Projects (school or hobby) in a related area
  2. Your personality and motivation for this project
  3. Merits
  4. Knowledge (your bachelor’s and master’s programmes, and relevant courses)

Apply before November 1st to andreas.munck@eirasystems.com