PhD – Post Doc
Funding : ANR Astrid project named RoboSCo
E-mail : hoang-anh.pham at univ-tln.fr
Bio
Graduate of the National Polytechnic Institute of Hanoi.
Research
Thesis topic: Coordination of underwater systems: towards an integrated object-oriented methodology in an Opensource environment
Thesis director : T. Soriano, PR, University of Toulon, COSMER Lab
Autonomous Submarine Vehicles (ASV) are increasingly used for ocean surveying in scientific fields. They are led to evolve in groups.
The choice of a generic control architecture scheme to manage a set of cooperative vehicles is of paramount importance to ensure the interoperability of the machines.
In a decentralized scheme, distributed control therefore allows good scalability and robustness. If a failure occurs on one of the vehicles, it is still possible to reassign the mission to the remaining fleet, which increases robustness to the mission. The disadvantages have to be precisely assessed; the available computing capabilities of each vehicle can be a limiting factor in solving complex problems; the information available on other vehicles can be inaccurate, incomplete or known with a delay and therefore there is a significant risk of collision in the event of malfunction. The work proposed in this thesis will explore in detail the modelling and quantification of these aspects of performance and robustness. The design of cooperative control laws requires taking into account the behaviour of one vehicle with those of others. To be more effective, control laws should be based on current and expected states of all vehicles. The overall behaviour of such systems is therefore complex and will be addressed with hybrid formalisms. It is planned to move forward on detailed behavioural scenarios and cooperative control algorithms dedicated to coordination for monitoring missions, initially simulated and then implemented.
Reuse, modularity and specialization are all elements to be associated with the production of a new application and are a strong point of object approaches. It will be necessary to write rules for customizing and reusing cooperative control elements developed in the laboratory in recent work. Indeed, these are points that we have explored for the case of a single ASV studied with an object-oriented methodology and that we wish to reuse and extend in a system engineering context to a collaboration of ASV in an Opensource environment.