Experience

AI Intern

Early-stage perception and autonomy-stack prototyping for a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) platform: data collection through to edge deployment, worked end to end and largely solo.

Atria University · CoE eMobility · July 2026

PythonU-NetYOLOv8OpenCVCVATROS 2 HumbleAutowareNVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GBLingBot-Map Early-stage prototype, ongoing development

Demo footage

Short clips of the perception pipeline running (camera input with track segmentation and detected pedestrians), plus recorded track footage.

AI Intern: Google Drive open in Drive ↗
Perception demo (videos) Open the full folder in Google Drive ↗

What I did

  • Independently developed an early-stage perception pipeline for a Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system, working across data collection, annotation, track segmentation, object detection and real-time perception testing.
  • Built a U-Net based track-segmentation model and a YOLOv8-based detector for pedestrians and road-relevant objects, then fused their outputs into a unified perception pipeline.
  • Tested the system on recorded track footage and live camera input. Segmentation was reliable on relatively straight track sections; broader robustness stayed constrained by the limited diversity of the training data.
  • Extended the work toward the wider autonomy stack: installed and tested ROS 2 Humble and Autoware on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB, and explored the integration requirements for LiDAR, radar, GNSS and other sensors.
  • Experimented with LingBot-Map for video-based 3D reconstruction, generating a short reconstruction locally despite GPU-memory limits, as an initial look at mapping approaches for the platform.

Technical highlights

Perception pipeline

  • Collected and prepared real-world track video data.
  • Converted video into training frames.
  • Annotated roughly 700 to 900 frames in CVAT.
  • Trained a U-Net for track segmentation.
  • Trained / fine-tuned YOLOv8 for object detection.
  • Fused segmentation and detection outputs into one perception pass.

Real-time evaluation

  • Tested perception on live camera input and recorded track footage.
  • Evaluated behaviour under real-world conditions.
  • Observed strong segmentation on relatively straight track sections.
  • Identified dataset diversity as the key limitation to robustness.

Autonomous mobility stack

  • NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB as the target compute.
  • ROS 2 Humble and Autoware installed and tested.
  • Tried both stable and latest Autoware configurations, plus simulation.
  • Explored the autonomous-vehicle software stack end to end.
  • Investigated LiDAR, radar and GNSS integration requirements.

Mapping exploration

  • Investigated LingBot-Map for video-based 3D reconstruction.
  • Ran the pretrained pipeline locally.
  • Generated a short (~3 second) reconstruction.
  • Looked into GPU-memory limits and practical feasibility for the platform.

Results

  • Working U-Net + YOLOv8 perception pipeline running on recorded and live track footage, with fused segmentation and detection output.
  • ROS 2 Humble and Autoware brought up and tested on Jetson AGX Orin, with a first pass over sensor-integration requirements for the future platform.
  • Short LingBot-Map 3D reconstruction produced locally as an initial mapping experiment.
  • This is exploratory engineering and research work on an early-stage prototype, not a completed autonomous vehicle or a production deployment.

In code

python
seg  = unet(frame)                    # track / not-track mask
dets = yolo(frame)                    # pedestrians + road objects
track_mask = (seg.argmax(0) == TRACK)
for box, cls, conf in dets:
    on_track = track_mask[box.cy, box.cx]
    events.append(Percept(cls, conf, box, on_track))▊

Fusing the two models into one perception pass: U-Net track mask plus YOLOv8 detections.

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