As Austria's largest research and technology organisation for applied research, we are dedicated to make substantial contributions to solving the major challenges of our time, climate change and digitalisation. To achieve our goals, we rely on our specific research, development and technology competencies, which are the basis of our commitment to excellence in all areas. With our open culture of innovation and our motivated, international teams, we are working to position AIT as Austria's leading research institution at the highest international level and to make a positive contribution to the economy and society.

Our Center for Vision, Automation & Control located in Vienna invites applications for a master’s thesis position. At the Center for Vision, Automation & Control our research unit “Assistive & Autonomous Systems” closely works with industrial partners in order to develop safe and reliable technology components for assistance systems, that can be used in various areas of applications, for e.g.: Railway / Public Transport, Construction Industry, Logistics & Transportation, Agriculture & Forestry as well as in Aviation.

• Throughout this master’s thesis, you will closely work with our researchers and engineers, who focus on the development and deployment of assistive and autonomous systems, particularly unmanned aircrafts and land-based mobile machines – Hereby you will communicate and engage with a multi-disciplinary team to solve diverse multi-facetted challenges.
• Automated robotic systems perceive the environment and can classify, locate, and track objects for various applications in domain-specific areas - Leveraging these capabilities, under the guidance of our team, you will participate in the development of a UAV swarm mission planner for disaster scenarios (wild-fire, floods).

• You will have the opportunity to work with reinforcement learning training environments and LLM models for enhanced robustness during complex disaster scenarios.
• You will integrate all necessary components for the training and evaluation of a dedicated UAV swarm mission planner.
• You contribute to a rapidly growing field in aerial robotics and LLMs.
• You can investigate the state-of-the-art and apply it in real-world scenarios and – as a final step – design a proof-of-concept demonstration.
• You will evaluate and document concepts and test-runs in predefined scenarios, and you may publish your results at a conference or in a journal.