Assignment type: Graduation
Start date: Any time
Assignment duration: 6 months
Location: Veghel
Educational level: WO
Desired study: Computer Science or similar
Language: English
Context
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) bring flexibility to warehousing, airport baggage handling, and parcel sorting. However, to combine this flexibility with high throughput in tight spaces, fine-grained coordination between the AVs is necessary. To that end, Vanderlande has developed a Fleet Management System (FMS). This FMS is responsible for controlling AVs in such a way that the system reaches the highest throughput feasible without collisions or deadlocks.
Problem description
One of our algorithms is a multi-agent path planner based on Cooperative A*; it plans paths of all the AVs fully in space and time for active jobs in real-time. This fully prevents deadlocks and offers possibilities for high optimization. However, due to the algorithm design, this can only be done single-threaded. As this significantly limits the scalability or resulting throughput, we want to extend the algorithm’s capabilities through parallelization.
Tasks / responsibilities
- Understand the challenges that the algorithm tries to solve
- Investigate existing state-of-the-art solutions in this domain
- Design a parallelized algorithm based on the principle of fully planning paths of AVs in space and time
- Prototype the algorithm in a programming language of choice (whether GPU-based, multi-core, multi-process)
- Integrate the algorithm into the FMS, including its emulation environment
- Benchmark performance of the algorithm in various scenarios
Department
Vanderlande Industries delivers material handling systems to control product flows in warehousing, sorting centers for package delivery, and baggage handling systems on airports.
Within Vanderlande, FLEET is responsible for developing solutions based on autonomous vehicle technology. These activities are carried out in close cooperation with other companies within Toyota Industries.
Your profile
- Background and interest in algorithm design
- Background and interest in performance optimization
- Strong analytical skills
Contact
Do you recognize yourself in this challenging profile? Are you looking for an internship in an organization that has been elected as “Best Employer” for years in a row? Please fill out the application form and upload your resume and cover letter. For more information, contact us by e-mail: internship@vanderlande.com or contact Stef Alferink (Campus Recruiter) by phone: +31 (0)413 – 75 50 87.