Student project: Ceiling-Mounted LiDAR as Ground-Truth for Robot and Human Localization

*Important for non-EU students: You'll need to be registered at a Dutch university to meet immigration requirements.

Develop a single-sensor LiDAR system that reveals the true trajectories of robots and people, enabling unbiased evaluation of indoor localization technologies.

What you will do

• Building on prior MSc work at Imec-NL Eindhoven that demonstrated reliable ceiling-mounted LiDAR tracking of moving people, this project will repurpose and extend the existing LiDAR pipeline as an offline evaluation instrument, rather than an online localization component.
  
  
• The ceiling-mounted LiDAR will be used to reconstruct high-resolution 2D trajectories of multiple agents, including:
  
  1) mobile robots carrying ultra wideband (UWB) tags, and
  
  2) moving people without relying on wearable electronics
  
  
• The LiDAR system will provide a global reference frame against which robot SLAM trajectories, UWB-based localization results, and human–robot interaction metrics can be evaluated offline. By decoupling ground-truth acquisition from online perception and control, the approach avoids bias introduced by additional infrastructure, while still enabling precise quantitative performance assessment under realistic conditions.
  
  
• Compared to traditional motion-capture systems (e.g. Vicon or Qualisys), the proposed approach relies on a single ceiling-mounted LiDAR, significantly reducing setup complexity while remaining scalable to larger indoor environments.

What we do for you

You will work on cutting-edge research at the intersection of indoor localization, robotics, and multi-agent systems.  Imec-NL offers a flexible research environment where you can take ownership of your project while receiving guidance from experts in wireless localization, sensing, and system evaluation. You will build upon existing, validated research results, while extending them toward a reusable experimental infrastructure with high scientific and practical impact.

Who you are

• MSc student in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Embedded Systems, or related field
• Available for a period of  9 months
• Affinity with sensing, signal processing, or robotics
• Experience with Python and/or MATLAB
• Familiarity with point-cloud processing or computer vision is a plus
• Experience with ROS, SLAM, or UWB is a plus (not required)
• Able to work independently and systematically
• Good written and verbal English skills
• Entitled to do an internship in the Netherlands

Interested

Does this position sound like an interesting next step in your career at imec? Don’t hesitate to submit your application by clicking on ‘APPLY’.
Should you have more questions about the job, you can contact jobs@imec.nl.