Guidance Navigation and Controls (GNC) Engineer III - Project Based

Guidance Navigation and Controls (GNC) Engineer III - Project Based

This is a project-based employee role supporting the development, integration, and validation of ASI's autonomous agricultural vehicle platforms. Development phases of this nature typically continue through project completion, often spanning two to four years, although scope and duration are determined by business and customer needs.

JOB SUMMARY

The Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Engineer III develops, integrates, and validates algorithms that enable ASI's autonomous agricultural equipment to navigate fields, follow planned routes, maintain stable vehicle control, and complete assigned operations safely and accurately. This role works with vehicle dynamics, localization, state estimation, trajectory planning, path tracking, and feedback-control systems to support reliable autonomous operation in agricultural environments.

As a Level III engineer within ASI's five-level engineering structure, this position independently contributes to moderately complex GNC features and subsystem improvements while receiving guidance on broader architectural and system-level decisions. The role collaborates with perception, embedded software, systems, test, and field operations teams to improve autonomous equipment performance across changing terrain, vegetation, field conditions, weather, payloads, and agricultural workflows.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develop, implement, integrate, and validate guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for autonomous agricultural equipment
• Contribute to vehicle motion-control capabilities involving steering, propulsion, braking, speed control, path tracking, and trajectory following
• Develop and tune feedback-control algorithms to improve vehicle stability, accuracy, responsiveness, and operational performance
• Support navigation capabilities that allow autonomous equipment to move safely and efficiently through fields, headlands, access roads, and defined work areas
• Develop and improve localization and state-estimation solutions using GPS/GNSS, RTK positioning, inertial sensors, encoders, odometry, and vehicle feedback
• Contribute to trajectory-generation, route-planning, and path-planning solutions for agricultural operations
• Support capabilities involving field coverage, row following, headland turns, pass planning, overlap management, and work-area completion
• Support coordination between vehicle motion, attached implements, perception outputs, and task-planning software
• Own defined GNC features and moderately complex assignments from development through integration, testing, and field validation
• Develop and refine vehicle-dynamics and system-behavior models to support controller design, simulation, and performance analysis
• Tune control parameters on physical equipment across varying terrain, speed, payload, soil, traction, and operating conditions
• Evaluate GNC performance using simulation, recorded-data replay, software-in-the-loop testing, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and full-vehicle field testing
• Develop measurable performance criteria for assigned features, including path accuracy, tracking error, localization accuracy, stability, response time, and task completion
• Analyze vehicle logs and field data to identify control limitations, localization errors, unstable behavior, and operational edge cases
• Develop tools and scripts for simulation, data processing, visualization, automated testing, controller tuning, and performance analysis
• Troubleshoot issues involving vehicle control, localization, sensor timing, coordinate transformations, communication interfaces, and system integration
• Collaborate with perception engineers to ensure terrain, obstacle, vegetation, and boundary information supports safe navigation and control decisions
• Work with embedded software engineers to integrate GNC algorithms into real-time vehicle-control and computing systems
• Partner with test engineers and field testers to develop procedures, reproduce issues, and validate corrective actions
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, sprint planning, and technical investigations
• Document algorithms, mathematical models, software…