Traversability Perception for Autonomous Off-Road 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.
Off-road, geometry alone does not tell where the vehicle can drive: tall grass can look like a wall, and mud or snow can look like flat ground. It must be fused with semantics. We want models that learn this without human labels, scaling with data and compute alone.
Goal description
This project focuses on traversability perception for trajectory planning: understanding where the vehicle can drive, so the planner can choose a safe path. Two suggested topics are:
- Self-supervised BEV semantic segmentation for traversability
- Pseudo-labeling for semantic segmentation using vision foundation models and/or VLMs
Our vehicle has stereo and thermal cameras, IMUs, wheel odometry and an Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin. We also have an Ouster lidar, and a 1/10-scale version 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):
- Projects (school or hobby) in a related area
- Personality and motivation to apply for this project
- Merits
- Knowledge (which bachelor's and master's, and relevant courses)
Apply before November 1st to andreas.munck@eirasystems.com