R&D Associate - Applied Research Mobility Systems

Select how often (in days) to receive an alert:

The Applied Research for Mobility Systems (ARMS) Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is seeking applicants for an R&D Associate Staff position focused on connected and automated vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, vehicle-in-the-loop simulation, and artificial intelligence for transportation. The successful candidate will develop testing, simulation, and data-driven methods to evaluate the energy, safety, and operational performance of emerging vehicle technologies.

Key activities include advancing VIL and HIL capabilities, integrating vehicle and sensor systems, developing standardized test procedures, and applying AI to scenario generation and system evaluation. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in vehicle systems and controls, real-time simulation, experimental integration, and artificial intelligence.

The ARMS group is within the Vehicle and Mobility Systems Research (VMSR) Section of the Buildings and Transportation Science Division (BTSD). The VMSR Section focuses on accelerating the development of advanced vehicles and complex mobility systems through advances in connected and autonomous vehicle technologies, communications, systems integration, and decision science. The objective of the ARMS Group is to provide leadership in advanced anything-in-the-loop research to accelerate the development of transportation technologies from component-level to full vehicles to traffic networks.

Research in ARMS group includes:

• Identify, collect, and process real-world data, such as road network information (geographic information systems data), traffic density and flow, signal timing plan, fleet population mix, routing, etc., and develop realistic scenarios in traffic microsimulation software and virtual environment/vehicle simulators.
• Establish detailed light-duty (LD), medium-duty (MD), and/or heavy-duty (HD) vehicle models with emerging mobility technology capabilities, such as connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), cooperative driving automation (CDA), and electrified vehicles. Develop simulations of these vehicles operating in diverse traffic, geographies, and environments to assess impact of emerging mobility technologies on the transportation system.
• Development and implementation of advanced software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) systems to support advanced powertrain, CAV and CDA control system design, validation, and verification.

Major Duties/Responsibilities:

• Develop standardized testing and evaluation methods to quantify the energy, safety, and operational performance of connected and automated vehicle and ADAS technologies.
• Design and conduct vehicle-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop experiments that integrate production vehicles, dynamo meters, vehicle controllers, virtual environments, and radar, camera, positioning, or other sensor-stimulation systems.
• Develop closed-loop control, system synchronization, and validation methods to ensure laboratory testing accurately represents closed-course and real-world vehicle behavior.
• Apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, time-series modeling, and generative methods to create realistic vehicle trajectories, model perception errors, and identify safety‑critical scenarios and edge cases.
• Develop scalable vehicle and traffic simulation, experimental automation, and data‑analysis tools using Python, MATLAB/Simulink, C/C++, and platforms such as dSPACE, CARLA, and SUMO.
• Lead experimental planning and system integration activities, including equipment selection, vehicle preparation, safety considerations, and coordination with external test facilities,…