Csiro Postdoctoral Fellowship in Robotics

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**The Opportunity**:

- **Do you have a PhD in **Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics?**:

- **Keen to work on a new approach to autonomous robot navigation?**:

- **Join the CSIRO Data61 for this exciting 3-year postdoctoral role**

CSIRO Early Research Career (CERC) Postdoctoral Fellowships provide opportunities to scientists and engineers who have completed their doctorate and have less than three years of relevant postdoctoral work experience. These fellowships aim to develop the next generation of future leaders of the innovation system.

Deploying robots in remote environments, such as the Moon, deep sea, underground mines, and caves, requires them to operate autonomously, perceive their surroundings, make decisions, plan their actions, and navigate extreme terrains with mínimal human intervention. Traditional solutions to robot autonomy rely on model-based pipelines, which decompose the overall task into a collection of inter-connected algorithmic and optimisation blocks. This fellowship pursues a new approach to autonomous robot navigation by exploiting the complementary nature of traditional (model-based) and modern (data-driven) robot autonomy paradigms. The work will build upon and extend implicit neural networks, a promising emerging paradigm that incorporates domain information and algorithmic priors into deep learning models. Using this paradigm, the CERC Fellow will create novel unified models that retain the structure of traditional autonomy pipelines while codesigning and simultaneously tuning components together, rather than individually for each block.

The CERC Fellow will demonstrate the methods developed in this project on a fleet of robots in realistic testbeds, simulating the exploration of remote planetary environments. The methods will be integrated into Wildcat, a state-of-the-art solution for simultaneous localisation and mapping, developed at CSIRO.

**Your duties will include**:

- Carrying out innovative, impactful research of strategic importance to CSIRO that will, where possible, lead to novel and important scientific outcomes.
- Recognising and exploiting opportunities for innovation and the generation of new theoretical perspectives, and progressing opportunities for the further development or creation of new lines of research.
- Delivering publications in top-tier robotics and machine learning venues, including ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL, RAL, ICML, NeurIPS, and JMLR.
- Contributing to open-source libraries for building nonlinear optimisation layers in PyTorch, and integrating into commercial software developed at CSIRO.

**Location**: Pullenvale, Queensland

**Salary**: AU$92k - AU$101k plus up to 15.4% superannuation

**Tenure**: Specified term of 3 years

**Reference**: 93571

**To be considered you will need**:

- A doctorate (or will shortly satisfy the requirements of a PhD) in a relevant discipline area, such as Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics. Please note: To be_ _eligible for this role you must have no more than 3 years (full-time equivalent) of postdoctoral research experience_._
- Experience implementing deep learning architectures in frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- High competency in at least one programming language, such as Python or C++.
- Strong mathematical skills, particularly Mathematical Optimisation.

For full details about this role please view the Position Description

**Eligibility**:
**Flexible Working Arrangements**:
We work flexibly at CSIRO, offering a range of options for how, when and where you work.

**Diversity and Inclusion**:
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