Internship: AI pathplanning

Company Description

A sustainable, profitable, and pleasant future for dairy farmers by combining robotics, engineering, and farming knowledge, that's what we believe in.

It all started over 75 years ago with a dream of two brothers in Maassluis. Since then, we have been an innovative leader in automated systems for dairy farmers worldwide. With 2,500 specialized professionals, we are constantly working on new agricultural revolutions. We still do this from our Campus in Maassluis, the building with the highest achievable sustainability performance in the Netherlands, but also worldwide. Our goal is to make dairy farming interesting for the next generation as well.

Job Description

At Lely we want to create a sustainable, profitable and enjoyable future for farmers. To achieve this, we develop robotic solutions to automate repetitive tasks at the dairy farm. The challenge is to make sure that our solutions work 24/7. Our robots should also be affordable for the farmer and friendly towards the animals. The most well-known example is the autonomous milking robot, of which thousands are sold each year in more than forty countries worldwide. But at Lely we also manufacture other robots to help dairy farmers with their daily work. One of those robots is the Discovery Collector. 

About the Discovery Collector 

The Discovery Collector is an autonomous robot from Lely that vacuums manure at dairy farms. It drives in between the cows to clean their habitat of up to 600 square meters about every 2 hours, in order to improve hygiene as well as to reduce emissions. This also means the robot cannot have too much downtime and therefore, it must be reliable. This is a huge challenge for several reasons. First of all, it drives an uncontrolled dynamic environment where cows are always moving around, where farmers come and go to take care of their animals and where other robots drive around to do various other tasks. It is also a dirty environment with manure and dust that create challenging conditions for the sensors and algorithms on the robot. And lastly, the robot has to deal with lots of variations. Its weight changes significantly as it cleans. Fences may be open on certain days and closed on others. There are uneven floors, slopes, changing weather conditions. All of this makes it challenging to design optimal cleaning behavior that works all around the world. 

Qualifications

This internship focuses on enhancing the Discovery Collector’s route planning through Reinforcement Learning (RL). Currently, technicians manually create routes using experience, intuition, and trial-and-error methods. The goal of this assignment is to develop an agent that, much like a skilled technician, can automatically generate reliable and efficient cleaning routes.

As an intern, you will work on:

• Designing and implementing an RL agent to create optimal cleaning routes based on barn layouts.
• Addressing constraints such as battery life, manure tank capacity, and environmental variations.
• Testing and refining the agent using our existing RL environment and a proof-of-concept model as a foundation for further development.

This project is a part of Lely’s ongoing R&D efforts to innovate and optimise robotics in dairy farming.

Your Profile

We are looking for a motivated intern who:

• Is currently pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in robotics, artificial intelligence, computer science, or a related field.
• Has experience or a strong interest in machine learning, particularly Reinforcement Learning.
• Possesses programming skills, ideally in Python, and experience with ML libraries (e.g., TensorFlow or PyTorch).
• Is proactive, detail-oriented, and passionate about advancing robotics technology in agricultural applications.

Additional Information

This internship at Lely provides:

• An opportunity to work in one of the most innovative and sustainable companies in the agricultural sector, with real-world applications impacting farmers worldwide.
• Mentorship and learning opportunities in a multidisciplinary team of engineers, technicians, and researchers.
• Flexible working conditions on our modern Lely Campus, equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and a strong focus on sustainability.
• Access to Lely’s renowned training programs and professional development through the Lely Academy.
• A dynamic and collaborative working environment where you can make a meaningful contribution to future farming.
• A compensation of max. €400,- per month;
• The possibility to stay in a company owned apartment;

Would you like to learn more about this internship or about working at Lely? Feel free to contact us or click the application button below to apply directly!