R&D Associate, Robotics and Navigation

About the Role

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in partnership with the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UT-ORII), is seeking an early-career engineer for groundbreaking research on robotics and navigation tailored for building construction. This role aims to address skilled labor shortages, increase productivity, improve quality, enhance safety, and lower costs in building construction. The successful candidate will be an ORNL staff member and a UT-ORII Fellow, collaborating with researchers from both UT and ORNL.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct research on technologies for affordable, energy-efficient, and resilient building construction and retrofits.
• Design and implement a modular ROS 2 software architecture for onboard sensing, autonomy, mapping, data logging, launch management, and configuration management.
• Develop and integrate ROS 2 drivers and hardware interfaces for LiDAR, inertial measurement units, RGB or stereo cameras, wheel odometry, survey-grade laser scanners, and additional sensing systems.
• Develop robust procedures for sensor calibration, coordinate-frame management, timestamp synchronization, and data acquisition across heterogeneous devices.
• Develop and evaluate multi-sensor localization and state-estimation methods that fuse LiDAR, IMU, camera, and wheel-odometry data in GPS-denied, low-light environments.
• Implement LiDAR-based or LiDAR-inertial SLAM, factor-graph or pose-graph optimization, loop-closure validation, drift estimation, and drift-correction methods for long trajectories in environments with limited and repetitive geometric features.
• Develop autonomous navigation capabilities, including path planning, obstacle avoidance, autonomous exploration, frontier selection, and localization-aware trajectory planning.
• Develop high-accuracy point cloud registration and mapping workflows.
• Plan and conduct experiments on physical robotic systems.
• Establish quantitative measures for localization drift, mapping accuracy, and navigation reliability.
• Publish results in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and communicate findings through technical reports and presentations.
• Contribute to the development of ideas and the assembly of proposals relevant to the UT-ORII Convergent Research Initiative.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Ph.D. in robotics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, aerospace engineering, or a closely related field.
• Hands-on experience integrating sensors, actuators, computing hardware, or communications interfaces on a mobile robotic platform.
• Demonstrated research or development experience in one or more of the following areas: automated controls, SLAM, autonomous navigation, or trajectory planning.
• Experience integrating hardware, deploying, and evaluating algorithms on physical robots.
• Proficiency in Python, modern C++, and Linux-based development environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with point cloud processing and registration using libraries such Open3D or equivalent.
• Experience with LiDAR-based or LiDAR-inertial SLAM, high-accuracy point cloud mapping, or scan-to-scan registration.
• Experience with ROS 2 navigation stack, lifecycle-managed nodes, TF2, rosbag workflows, and distributed system diagnostics.
• Experience with CUDA and deployment on NVIDIA edge-GPU platforms (Jetson Orin, Thor, or Spark).
• Experience calibrating and synchronizing LiDAR, IMU, camera, and wheel-odometry systems.
• Experience with underground, off-road, subterranean, or other unstructured-environment robotics and field testing.
• Experience with Docker for containerization and deployment.
• A strong publication record in robotics, controls, autonomous systems, sensor fusion, mapping, or a related area.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Motivated self-starter with the ability to work independently and to participate creatively in collaborative teams.
• Ability to function well in a fast-paced research environment, set priorities, accomplish multiple tasks within deadlines, and adapt to changing needs.