Motional

Senior Controls Engineer – Autonomy

Motional

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $168,000 - $244,000 per year

Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

LinuxPythonSQL

About the role

  • The Controls Team is responsible for the synthesis and execution of dynamic trajectories by the Motional Autonomous Vehicle, focusing on comfortable and safe trajectories, control system design, and communication interfaces.
  • Work on enabling cutting-edge capabilities for Motional’s AV including algorithm design and documentation, software development, metrics definition, simulation implementation and evaluation, and in-vehicle testing.
  • Bringup of a reverse driving controller (longitudinal and lateral) from scratch to support reverse driving capabilities across Motional’s fleet of AVs.
  • Design, implement, and test low-level controllers, state estimators, and state-machine logic that interface with platform sensors and actuators to produce performant, comfortable, and safe motion tracking.
  • Architect and implement dynamic simulation environments and validate simulation models against real-world data.
  • Integrate upstream trajectory generation and downstream motion tracking controllers through principled trajectory interface design and state machine logic.
  • Develop test/analysis tooling for isolated evaluation of motion tracking performance and incremental integration testing incorporating upstream components.
  • Define and implement performance, comfort, and safety metrics for motion planning and control, and perform quantitative analysis of fleet-wide vehicle data.
  • Formulate, implement, analyze, and test optimization and machine learning-based frameworks for dynamic trajectory synthesis.
  • Support root-cause analysis of simulation, closed-course, and public road events from a motion planning and control perspective.
  • Travel for in-person vehicle testing at Motional’s and partner deployment/test track locations, typically once every 4 to 6 months.

Requirements

  • MS, PhD preferred, in one of Control Theory / Robotics / Computer Science / Applied Math or a related field
  • 3+ years of experience developing controls / motion planning related algorithms and components in an industrial setting
  • Experienced with concepts from control theory, including linear/nonlinear systems, state estimation / Kalman filtering, model predictive control, data-driven system identification, time-series data processing, and data visualization
  • Familiarity with numerical optimization, quadratic/conic programming, convex optimization, nonlinear programming, and non-convex optimization
  • 3+ years of industry experience implementing C++/C and Python
  • Familiarity with Linux-based operating systems
  • Bonus Points: Proven experience in an industry setting with the implementation of reverse driving trajectory tracking control for vehicles
  • Bonus Points: Familiarity with vehicle dynamics and modeling, including longitudinal/lateral vehicle dynamics, tire modeling, EV drive-train / steer dynamics, etc.
  • Bonus Points: General familiarity with machine learning, including supervised learning, reinforcement learning, training/test validation, etc.
  • Bonus Points: Publications in Controls/Robotics or Autonomous Driving conferences/journals (CDC, ACC, TAC, CSL, Automatica, IROS, ICRA, CoRL, RAL, TRO, IV, ITSC, T-ITS)
  • Bonus Points: Familiarity with SQL, Looker, MATLAB/SimuLink
  • Bonus Points: Familiarity with Gitlab, Bazel, VSCode / CLion
  • Bonus Points: Familiarity with AV industry simulation tooling
  • Bonus Points: Familiarity with CAN communication protocol, AUTOSAR, AURIX
  • Bonus Points: Familiarity with real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS localization