Internship - Programming & Automation

WE CANNOT PROVIDE VISA SPONSORSHIP Details Preferred starting date: ASAP Weekly availability: Full-time (5 days/week) Period: 6 months Location: Aerospace Innovation Hub, Delft, the Netherlands About the company Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. Currently, we are developing software for advanced onboard UAV situational awareness in military applications. Using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute, our solutions are built for scalability. From there, we plan to develop a line-up of interconnected solutions to safeguard European safety. Our team consists of engineers who are passionate about the technology and solutions they develop. The only time most of us are not thinking about the technology is when we are asleep, and sometimes even then. Our team members come from different backgrounds such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics, and Computer Graphics. Our office is located in the Aerospace Innovation Hub, a start-up hub on the TU Delft campus in the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering. We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from government agencies and prime contractors to academic research institutes and other start-ups. Our projects span from large tender orders in collaboration with partners to low-TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment. The project Sensor calibration is a manual job today, and it does not scale to the number of sensor units we intend to ship. We are building automated test and calibration infrastructure to fix that, starting with a cell built around a UFactory UF850 robotic arm on a linear rail. We already have the arm and the calibration software. What we do not have is the physical cell around it, or the software that drives it. This first project is split into two internships that run side by side: • Robot programming and automation — this position • Mechanical design and integration — separate posting The two interns will work closely together. Neither half of this project is any good on its own. This calibration cell is the first thing we are building on this front, not the last, so there is a good chance the right person carries on to other robotics and automation projects once it is running. Your role If you are the kind of person who is not satisfied until an automated system actually works reliably, not just once, this internship is designed for you. We are looking for a Robot Programming & Automation Intern to help build the software behind our robotic test and automation infrastructure. Your first project is turning a robotic arm on a linear rail into a system that reliably captures good calibration data — but the skills involved are the same ones we’ll lean on for whatever we automate next: getting a robot to move well, knowing whether the data it’s collecting is any good, and building something solid enough to run unattended. Getting that right is the substance of this internship, on this project and on whatever comes after it. What you’ll do • Build the robot control layer: drive the arm through its SDK, coordinate the linear rail, and plan safe motion inside a cell that also has a target, cables, and an operator in it. • Design pose generation that’s actually informed by the calibration problem, including getting proper coverage across a multi-camera rig rather than just one lens at a time. • Get the timing and synchronisation right between the robot, the cameras, and the captured data — this is where automated rigs usually go wrong. • Gate data quality at capture time, and retry within the run rather than finding out l