Ascenders summer internship
One of the best things about Ascend is how members take their skills beyond the workshop and straight into summer internships. See what some of our Ascenders were up to this summer!
August Lind
Summer intern at Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace (KDA)
My name is August, and I have been part of Ascend for the past two years. During this time, I have had the pleasure of being a member of the Perception team, as well as serving as Chief Engineer. I am now entering my fourth year studying Cybernetics and Robotics.
This summer, I had the opportunity to work as a summer intern at Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace (KDA), where I worked on the "LocalHawk" project. LocalHawk is KDA's student project focusing on drone technology. This year's challenge was a search mission, where the goal was to explore swarm technology to efficiently search for injured people in an area and report the person's location back to a ground station. This was a complex task that gave us plenty to work on.
We had to work both with embedded, like adding sensors such as rangefinder, and with creating detection algorithms for IR cameras. On top of that, we built an intelligent swarm capable of tolerating the addition of more drones, as well as a GUI for the mission operators to confirm whether a "person" detected by the drones was in fact a person. We divided the drones into two separate roles: the Shepherd, equipped with an IR camera to detect heat signatures, the points of interest we wanted to investigate, and the Sheep, which searched the identified area to confirm whether the heat signal was human using a RGB camera before reporting back to the ground station operators.
My experience from Ascend was definitely very helpful for this internship. Having already worked extensively with drones, I could focus more quickly on developing software relevant to the project, thanks to my existing understanding of drone systems. It was especially helpful for debugging and working with PX4 and ROS, and my prior experience also benefited the rest of the team.In the end, I believe this internship became even more rewarding thanks to the hands-on experience I had already gained through Ascend.
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Selina Bolme
Summer intern at Disruptive Technologies
My name is Selina Bolme, and this summer I had the opportunity to intern at Disruptive Technologies.
A little about me: I was a member of Hardware Team 26, and I am now the leader of Team 27. I am also starting my second year of a master's degree in Cybernetics and Robotics.
Disruptive Technologies specializes in tiny wireless sensors and making data collection as simple as possible for its customers. Their customers include hospitals and large supermarket and convenience store chains, where monitoring and compliance are important. Imagine being able to keep track of hundreds of refrigerators across different locations from one place.
This summer, I worked on a hardware project together with two other interns in Trondheim. Our task was to explore a generic solution that could connect off-the-shelf sensors to the DT platform. The idea is that customers could use a wider range of sensors without DT having to develop entirely new products for every measurement need. Instead, the solution could build on existing sensor technology and measurement techniques.
In total, we were eight interns: three working on hardware in Trondheim, three working on software in Oslo, and two working with business development. Three of us were also members of Ascend. We first heard about the internship through DT's sponsorship of Ascend, and several DT employees are former Ascenders.
I had a lot of fun during my internship and learned a huge amount. I was initially a little worried that, after only one year of university, I wouldn't be able to contribute very much. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I was able to contribute, particularly thanks to the experience I have gained through Ascend.
We also had plenty of social activities, including two trips to Oslo to spend time with the rest of the interns and the Oslo office.
I am very grateful for the opportunity and for everything I learned this summer. 10/10 would recommend!
Oskar Norevik Meldal
Summer intern at Aviant
This summer, I worked at Aviant, a company that builds autonomous drones for food delivery. Compared to other summer jobs, my tasks were closely tied to the company's operations and the development of new drone solutions. My main project was to improve a landing and charging station, where the drone could land autonomously and recharge. Alongside this, I worked on developing Aviant's latest drone version.
I got this summer job solely because of my role in Ascend, and it is thanks to the experience and network I gained here.
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Lars André Roda Jansen
Summer intern at Norbit - electronics engineer
Hello. My name is Lars André and i am currently a second year Cybernetics student at NTNU.I have been a part of Ascend now for two years, both as a part of the autonomy team.
During the summer of 2026 i have been working as an electronics engineer in the Subsea RnD department of Norbit. Norbit, amongst other things, develops, produces and services sonars, where the Subsea RnD department is part of the development of these sonars. There i've been mainly working on two projects:- creating software for a test jig to detect shorted neighbouring piezo-elements on a receiver part of a sonar,- reworking a VHDL implentation for an FPGA which translates from UART to an in-house protocol.The first project started as a more high-level python project which involved pulling down specific GPIO pins on a PCB to affect the readings of a sonar.These readings could then be used to pin down faulty piezo-elements on the sonar.During the project, i had to find and fix faults on the PCB and implement a newer revision of the test jig,which mostly involved a lot of soldering, something i am not particularly good at as a mainly software engineer.The second project required learning FPGAs and VHDL development from scratch.This was quite exciting, as it was a completely new to me and required a new way of thinking when writing code.Skills and experience from Ascend and my studies has been relevant during this summer.While the tools and programming languages used in Ascend have not necessarily been directly relevant as an autonomy member,the general software development experience attained has been useful.During this summer i've been able to learn new- and further develop my software and electronics related skills, and gain hands-on experience relevant to my studies.
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Peter Døvle
Summer intern at Ubiq Aerospace - electronics team
My name is Peter, I was in the hardware group in team 26, and I am the deputy chief engineer of team 27.
This summer, I interned at Ubiq Aerospace in their electronics team. Ubiq Aerospace makes ice protection systems for drones, and on the team I participated in making and designing printed circuit boards for the ice protection systems, both flexible and rigid circuits.
The hardest issue of making systems for drones is definitely the geometry of fitting the system in a really tight space. "Will this PCB fit inside the propellar?" and "How much can I bend this?" were only some of the many weirdly interesting questions I had to ponder on in my 6 weeks at Ubiq this summer; the problems always had to be solved in an interesting and unique way, and the results were always rewarding.
My experience with making PCBs at Ascend helped me a lot in my time at Ubiq, and my knowledge of circuit design has definitely expanded even further, which has been quite fun.
Working with Ubiq has given me a lot of learning moments working with the other teams in the company, and solving problems in a collaborative manner.
