City:  Stuttgart
Date:  Oct 8, 2025

Student Assistant (m/f/d)- Software Development for Cutting-Edge Autonomous Outdoor Robot Navigation

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (www.fraunhofer.com) currently operates 76 institutes and research units throughout Germany and is a leading applied research organization. Around 32 000 employees work with an annual research budget of 3.4 billion euros. 

Advertisement for the field of study such as: automation technology, electrical engineering, computer science, control engineering, software design, software engineering, technical computer science or comparable.

 

In the Navigation of Mobile Robots group we develop autonomous, mobile robots for a variety of outdoor applications, such as agriculture, forestry and logistics. The focus is on the development of an autonomous outdoor navigation solution as well as the hardware of the robots.

We are looking for a motivated student to join us and help with software implementation and evaluation tasks. If you enjoy programming, trying out new ideas and implementations and contributing to our navigation software stack, this will be an excellent opportunity to get to know the landscape of autonomous robot navigation.

 

What you will do

Your work will include implementing smaller features in our software components particularly in the area of robot localization, as well as testing and evaluating new ideas and promising approaches from research publications and open source releases. You will also test and deploy the software on the real robots in our test environments. One of the first tasks will be evaluating the use of existing visual-inertial odometry solutions within our localization framework.

 

What you bring to the table

  • Background in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Autonomous Systems or similar, currently enrolled in bachelors or masters program
  • Some experience with C++ and Linux
  • Experience with the following is a plus: ROS 2, computer vision, pointcloud-processing, machine learning, docker, git
  • Enthusiasm for mobile robotics
  • Fluent in English or German

 

What you can expect

  • Future possibility of doing university projects or bachelors/master thesis building upon your work
  • Cutting-edge technology in the field of outdoor mobile robotics
  • Hands on with our robots on our own test environments in Stuttgart
  • Take on responsibility and freedom to implement your own ideas
  • Work with the best students in their discipline
  • Familiar atmosphere including Cake Thursday

 

We value and promote the diversity of our employees' skills and therefore welcome all applications - regardless of age, gender, nationality, ethnic and social origin, religion, ideology, disability, sexual orientation and identity. Severely disabled persons are given preference in the event of equal suitability.

With its focus on developing key technologies that are vital for the future and enabling the commercial utilization of this work by business and industry, Fraunhofer plays a central role in the innovation process. As a pioneer and catalyst for groundbreaking developments and scientific excellence, Fraunhofer helps shape society now and in the future. 

Interested? Apply online now. We look forward to getting to know you!
 

Ms. Jennifer Leppich

Recruiting

+49 711 970-1415

jennifer.leppich@ipa.fraunhofer.de 

Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA 

www.ipa.fraunhofer.de 

 

Requisition Number: 81616                Application Deadline:

 


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