DARPA Subterranenan Challenge - Vision for Robotics and Autonomous Systems group position

Research of our group is mainly driven by the participation in DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) - a series of robotic contests organised by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which reflects the requirement of increasing safety and efficiency of underground search-and-rescue missions. In the SubT challenge, teams of mobile robots have to detect, localise and report positions of specific objects in GPS-denied and perception-challeneging environment. Our team has already participated in the first round called Tunnel+Urban Circuit and won the gold medal among non-sponsored teams. Overall we took the 3rd place, proving our team competitive with the top-tier robotics labs such as MIT, ETH or JPL. Since one of the main critical components is the accurate localisation in GPS-denied environment, we are expanding the team by a single PhD student, whose research will be focused on multi-modal Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM) in the GPS-denied environment. In particular, the main focus of the research will be on the robustness to challenges typical for such environments such as dark (camera image degradation), fog and shallow puddles (lidar measurements degradation), mud and uneven terrain (dead reckoning failures).

Vision for Robotics and Autonomous Systems group (https://cyber.felk.cvut.cz/vras/) seeks one excellent PhD student on the following fully-funded position:

We seek candidate:
- who is excellent, self-motivated, and willing to push the boundaries of the state-of-the-art in robotics and AI
- have experience in the computer science, python/c++ development, optimisation/machine learning
- has achieved at least one outstanding result of any form (rank-A/A* conference paper, awards, scholarships, participation in programming contests or mathematical/physics olympiads)

We offer:
- access to the top-tier computational grid and robots
- participation in the best scientific conferences and the DARPA challenge
- full funding corresponding to the gross salary of CZK 40.000 per month (it is approximately 1600 EUR per month)
- direct bonuses for scientific achievements such as accepted topi-tier publications or winning in significant AI/robotic challenges

The application should be a single PDF file including applicant CV and recommendation letter.