Two Ph. D. positions are announced at the Department of Engineering “Enzo Ferrari” of the
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia about autonomous systems in the national Ph.D programme (DAuSY).

CALL
We seek for motivated students holding a master’s in electrical engineering, Engineering
Physics, Mathematics or neighboring disciplines. A strong background in control theory
and/or signal processing will be preferred. Good English communication skills are necessary.

Position 1. The research project has a focus on intelligent vehicles and aims at
complementing the motion planning and control of an autonomous vehicle with the
capabilities of safely interacting with the surrounding human road users (including
pedestrians, cyclists and drivers). In order to enable such a capability, available data
containing the HRUs’ behavior can be used, which is collected through traffic
infrastructures, wearables, mobile devices, on-board vehicle sensors. The project is at the
verge of control theory, signal processing and machine-learning.

Position 2. This research project is in collaboration with Iveco Defense Vehicles (Bolzano,
Italy) and its objective is designing multi-vehicle coordination tasks, with the goal of
accomplishing a common task. The coordination strategies must account for the vehicle
physical limitation and motion dynamics and additional constraining arising from the
definition of the collaborative task, like, e.g., reaching a position with prescribed state in
order to enable load/unload operation, safe negotiation of narrow passages or junctions,
implementation of interaction protocols with off-board human operators.

2 Ph.D. positions in DAuSY