Flight Guidance & Motion Planning Engineer
ZurichFull-timePosted 2mo ago
About the role
Role focused on motion planning, trajectory generation, and guidance laws for high-speed autonomous flight. Owns motion planning, trajectory generation, and guidance with imperfect inputs from estimator and perception, weighs classical vs learning-based methods, and ensures safe, high-speed flight performance.
Responsibilities
- Motion Planning: Plan dynamically feasible paths onboard, including obstacle avoidance, replanning as the situation changes, and perception-aware planning.
- Trajectory Generation: Turn those paths into feasible references under airframe and actuator limits, handed cleanly to the control loop.
- Guidance Laws: Design the laws that steer the aircraft along the reference and hold it there.
- Interfaces & Perception Coupling: Own the input contracts for the ego-state from Navigation and the perception pipeline, and handle their latency, rate, and dropout, including behavior when an input drops.
- Mode & Failsafe Logic: Across cruise, loiter, and approach, including lost-link behavior.
- Flight Test & Diagnosis: Verify across simulation, SITL, and HITL, including Monte Carlo campaigns, then fly and iterate from logs.
- Mentorship: Depending on seniority, support the team by mentoring junior engineers.
Qualifications
- A degree in aerospace, robotics, GNC, or related STEM field (strong academic record; practical track record emphasized).
- Proven experience with onboard motion planning, trajectory generation, and tracking, and with guidance laws on flying platforms.
- Hands-on experience closing a control loop on a perception output, handling latency and dropout.
- Familiarity with learning-based planning or guidance and simulation-based training, with ability to weigh against classical approaches.
- Professional attributes: systems-minded, pragmatic about failure modes, disciplined about simulation/validation, clear communicator, capable of presenting results to engineers and senior stakeholders, thrives in fast-paced environments.
- Bonus: Experience with vision-based or perception-coupled guidance.
- Commitment: 100% dedication to Harmattan AI's mission.
Skills
Required:Motion PlanningTrajectory GenerationGuidance LawsPerception-Coupled Control
Nice to have:Learning-Based Methods
Benefits
- Not specified in the description.
Last updated Aug 5, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Harmattan AI
Building the Future of Autonomous Warfare.
Building the Future of Autonomous Warfare.
Autonomous WarfareUASPayloadCounter-UAS
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