Internship/Master thesis (f/m/x): Automatization of flight software quality checks using AI

The Institute of Space Systems in Bremen is dedicated to designing and analyzing future spacecraft and space missions, including launchers, orbital and exploration systems, and satellites. Our evaluations focus on the technical feasibility, performance and costs of these systems, utilizing a range of cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary engineering methods.

What to expect

The development of flight-worthy software for GNC systems requires not only good testing strategies but a systematic software engineering process which involves careful requirements flow down, documentation maintenance, reviews, traceability maintenance, and checks in all these steps. In the context of the Flight Software (FSW) development in the GNC department of DLR, many of these checks and actions are currently performed by the developers, given that most of these checks do not have clear deterministic solutions, but require knowledge of the context or at least text interpretation. This adds complexity and time to the process since much time has to be devoted for product assurance instead of creating code. The human in the loop also makes the process susceptible to errors, since there is a big complexity to be managed.
In order to automate these checks and consequently reduce the development time, keep code quality and reduce errors, the GNC department in Bremen developed an AI-powered framework that systematize the creation, verification and execution of code quality checks. This framework now needs now to be carefully expanded and verified to finally be used in the development of high-quality aerospace software that will be part of many exciting missions!

Your tasks

• Understanding the quality checks performed in the FSW Development process
• Creation of prompts that reliably perform the quality checks required by the department
• Creation of verification datasets for the different quality checks
• Integration of these into the AI-powered framework and reliability verification
• Integration of the checks to the FSW development

Your profile

• Currently studying for a Master’s degree and holding a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering
• Experience with Python and unittest
• Experience with Ollama and Llamma.cpp, or equivalent
• Prompt engineering
• Conformance with the personal requirements for handling of export controlled goods and information according to German, European and American export control law

We look forward to getting to know you!

If you have any questions about this position (Vacancy-ID 6546) please contact:

Hans Krüger

Tel.: +49 421 24420 1126