About the role#
NASA is working toward a permanent presence on the moon. This requires new ways to manage and coordinate multiple vehicles and agents in environments with limited infrastructure. This internship focuses on researching autonomous coordination through algorithms, digital twins, and nature-inspired behaviors.
What you'll do#
- Create scenarios for multiple agents to perform sustained missions that require self-coordination.
- Use generative swarm intelligence methods to build these mission scenarios.
- Design concepts of operation for self-navigation, self-separation, and self-organization.
- Determine how to distribute functional tasks between vehicles and external services.
- Build algorithms and agentic methods for self-organization, including multi-agent reinforcement learning and negotiation.
- Apply concepts like ant stigmergy or other animal behaviors to collective coordination.
- Develop a framework and prototypes for a digital twin to test multi-agent decision-making.
- Perform low fidelity analyses to evaluate collective behaviors and system performance.
What you'll need#
- You must be a U.S. citizen.
- You must be currently enrolled as an undergraduate sophomore, junior, or senior, or in a graduate master's or doctoral program.
- Your degree program must be in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mathematics, or Statistics.
Location & details#
- Location: Moffett Field, California.
- Term: Summer 2027 (June 7 to August 13).
- Work modality: On-site.
- This is a full-time, unpaid internship.
About NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is a government agency founded in 1958. It conducts research and development in aeronautics, space exploration, and science. The organization operates from various locations across the United States, including its headquarters in Washington, DC. With over 53,000 employees, it manages missions involving rockets, spacecraft, and Earth observation.
How to get in at NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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