Title:
Towards the design of a distributed and validated architecture for a set of mobile autonomous robots

Topic:
Nowadays, one of the main challenges in robotics is to design an heterogeneous team of cooperating robots that are adaptive to unexpected changes arising on the robots (failures, communication breakdowns), or on their environment. To achieve this, it is required to specify, implement and deploy a distributed architecture that deals with such a team.

Moreover, it is essential to develop some tools that guarantee that the developed architecture ensures some well-established properties particularly in terms of ability to meet  mission objectives, safety, self-healability, and self-adaptation in a dynamic environment.  

The research activities of the post-doc will focus on the following tasks:

- Specification of the *-ability properties related to distributed diagnosis and repair and required in the context of heterogeneous robots in a highly dynamical environment
- Verification and validation of a candidate architecture with respect to the specified properties both at the entity level and at the collective level
- Analysis of existing specifications and providing recommendations/feedbacks to designers of (hardware/software) to ensure the specified properties
- Automated deployment of formal and validated specifications as software modules of the robots.

This study is conducted in the framework of the ROSACE project (Robots et Systèmes Auto-adaptatifs Communicants Embarqués – Robots and Embedded Auto-adaptive Communicating Systems) funded by the French Network for Advanced Research dedicated to Science and Technology for Aerospace Systems.  The project is jointly conducted by IRIT, LAAS and ONERA. The project is focused on a multi-robots platform composed of unmanned aerial/ground vehicles. This platform will be provided and maintains by LAAS-CNRS and ONERA as an experimental system that will be used to implement, illustrate and validate the outputs of the project.

Requirements: PhD in a related field (model-based reasoning, distributed systems, diagnosis, repair, validation and verification, robotics).

Starting date: September/October 2008

Duration: 1 to 2 years

Applicants should send:
- a resume/bio
- pointers to their most important publications and/or their PhD (only French or English documents)
- recommendation letter(s)

Contact person:
Elodie Chanthery (elodie.chanthery@laas.fr) Phone: +33 5 61 33 64 45
Yannick Pencolé (yannick.pencole@laas.fr) Phone: +33 5 61 33 69 20

Laboratory
LAAS-CNRS, DISCO group
7 avenue du Colonel Roche - 31077 Toulouse, FRANCE