Master Thesis 30 HP Mission-Critical Runtime Assurance for Autonomous Combat Aircraft

Are you a student eager to apply your theoretical knowledge and fresh perspectives to real-world challenges At Saab we believe that innovation thrives on new ideas and your master thesis project could be the spark that ignites our next technological breakthrough.

We recognize the immense value that students bring to our company. Your academic rigor combined with your enthusiasm for cutting-edge technology allows you to approach problems with a unique and insightful lens. At Saab youll have the opportunity to collaborate with experienced engineers and specialists gaining invaluable practical experience while making a tangible contribution to our growth and development.

Future autonomous aircraft are expected to rely increasingly on advanced planning decision-making and guidance functions based on optimization machine learning and other complex methods. These functions can provide significant operational benefits but their complexity also makes exhaustive verification difficult particularly when they are updated frequently or must operate under changing and uncertain mission conditions.

Runtime assurance provides a way of supervising such functions during operation and intervening when critical conditions are threatened. Traditional runtime assurance has primarily focused on platform safety for example avoiding collisions or violations of the flight envelope. However actions that are supposed to increase flight safety may prevent the mission from being completed for example by consuming critical resources missing a time-critical objective or moving into an unfavorable position for subsequent tasks. Mission-critical runtime assurance therefore extends the concept from maintaining safety to also maintaining mission feasibility and useful mission capability.

Description of the Thesis Project
The purpose of this thesis project is to investigate mission-critical runtime assurance for autonomous combat aircraft. The student will study how an advanced planning or guidance function can be supervised at runtime so that proposed actions remain compatible with successful completion of the mission. The primary function may for example be an optimization-based planner a reinforcement learning policy or another advanced and frequently updated guidance function.

A central part of the work is to investigate how mission feasibility and recoverability can be represented and evaluated. This may include defining a mission-recoverable set that considers not only the aircraft state but also mission progress remaining tasks available resources and relevant environmental conditions. A runtime monitor can then predict the consequences of proposed actions and intervene when mission recoverability is threatened for example by modifying a command initiating replanning or transferring authority to an assured contingency mode.

The work is expected to include a literature study development and implementation of suitable runtime-assurance concepts and algorithms and evaluation through simulation in a representative autonomous-aircraft scenario. Important topics include prediction of future mission feasibility under uncertainty design of suitable fallback behaviors switching between advanced and assured functions and the interaction between mission-critical and safety-critical assurance. The developed approach may be evaluated in terms of mission success safety resource consumption unnecessary interventions and computational performance.

The thesis will be carried out together within the Division of Mission Systems & Autonomy at Saab Aeronautics which works with technologies and concepts for future combat aircraft systems. The project contributes to ongoing research and development on distributed sensing data fusion autonomy and resilient mission systems and gives the student an opportunity to work on a research problem closely connected to the development of future mission capabilities. The broader research theme is explicitly intended to connect focused masters thesis projects to longer-term challenges relevant to Saab.

The project is suitable for preferably one at maximum two students with an interest in automatic control optimization agentic models and autonomous systems.

You are in the final stage of your masters program in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering or equivalent and are about to begin a 30 hp thesis project. The thesis project will involve theoretical analysis modelling coding and simulation.

We provide the support and guidance you need to translate your theoretical knowledge into practical solutions. Join us and become a driving force behind Saabs technological advancements!

This position requires that you pass a security vetting based on the current regulations around/of security protection. For positions requiring security clearance additional obligations on citizenship may apply.

Kindly observe that this is an ongoing recruitment process and that the position might be filled before the closing date of the advertisement.

Contact information

Karina Wandt Manager

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Robin Forsling Supervisor

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