ENIB International Mini Symposium in Robotics (11 mai 2023)

14:30-15:00

Loïck Degorre (IRDL, Brest, France)

* Loïck Degorre

** Affiliation

Institut de recherche Dupuy de Lôme / École nationale d’ingénieurs de
Brest, France

** Title

« Enhancing mobility of uneractuated AUV through control and reconfigurable propulsion »

** Abstract

This talk gives an overview of the controllers and thrust vectoring solutions developed at IRDL ENIB to enhance the mobility of underactuated underwater vehicles. After a quick state of the art introducing some of the most popular guidance and control methods in the literature, some new solutions are introduced. Notably, this talk introduces a new model-based kinematic guidance method and hints
towards flatness-based control solutions for the problem of underactuated surface vehicles. The second aspect of the study carried out at IRDL ENIB concerns the propulsion technology of these vehicles
and particularly reconfigurable propulsion. Two reconfigurable propulsion solutions are introduced to enhance the mobility of an underactuated AUV by adding only lightweight actuators to unlock new
degrees of freedom: the magneto-coupled reconfigurable thruster and dynamic thruster repositionning system.

** Biography

Loïck Degorre is a third year PhD Student at IRDL-ENIB. He graduated an engineering diploma and a master dregree in robotics at Polytech Sorbonne and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts et Métiers in 2020. His study is now mainly focused on design and control of marine craft notably working on the mobility of underwater underactuated vehicles.

* Bruno Siciliano

** Affiliation

PRISMA Lab
Department of Electrical Engineering & Information Technology University of Naples Federico II

** Title

« Robot Manipulation and Control »

** Abstract

This talk presents research results @ PRISMA Lab on robot manipulation and control. The talk is organized in four parts. In the first part, control techniques for dynamic nonprehensile manipulation are presented. The second part of the talk focuses on how to merge learning and model-based strategies to provide autonomy to robot manipulation. In the third part, several aerial robotics applications for inspection and maintenance are surveyed. The final part of the talk deals with recent advances on shared control including haptic guidance.

** Biography

Bruno Siciliano is professor of robotics and control at the University of Naples Federico II. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Óbuda where he holds the Kálmán Chair. His research interests in robotics include manipulation and control, human–robot cooperation, and service robotics. Fellow of the scientific societies IEEE, ASME, IFAC, he received numerous international prizes and awards, including the 2022 Engelberger Award for Education. He was President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2008 to 2009. He has delivered more than 150 keynotes and has published more than 300 papers and 7 books. His book “Robotics” is among the most adopted academic texts worldwide, while his edited volume “Springer Handbook of Robotics”
received the highest recognition for scientific publishing: the 2008 PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics. His team has received more than 18 million Euro funding in the last 15 years from competitive European research projects.

* Philippe Wenger

** Affiliation

Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes UMR CNRS 6004, Nantes Université, École Centrale Nantes, CNRS, Nantes, France

** Title

« A robot inspired by the bird neck »** Abstract

We present the developments carried out within the framework of the ANR Avineck project in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris. In the context of sustainable development, robots must meet characteristics that are safe for users and economical for both construction and energy costs. The mechanical properties of natural systems selected and “optimized” by natural pressures can inspire technological solutions, in particular applications in robotics. The Avineck project falls within this
framework. Its objective is to quantify and interpret the relationships between the anatomy of the neck of birds, its mechanical properties and its functioning and to draw inspiration from these characteristics to design more efficient manipulator robots. We present the approach that led to the development of a robot prototype built by stacking tensegrity mechanisms. The actuation is deported through cables. These cables, alongside springs, represent the musculoskeletal system in a simplified way.

** Biography

Philippe Wenger graduated in mechanical engineering from Ecole Centrale de Nantes in 1985 and obtained his Ph.D in Robotics from the University of Nantes in 1989. He was an Assistant Professor from 1989 to 1990. Since 1991, he has been a full-time CNRS researcher at Institut de Recherche en Communications et  Cybernétique de Nantes (IRCCyN) until 2016 and Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N) since 2017. Until 2016, he was the head of the Robotics team at IRCCyN that comprised 65 members. He served as a vice-chair of the IFToMM Technical Commitee for Computational Kinematics from 2011 to 2021. He has been working on robot kinematics and singularities of serial and parallel manipulators for 30 years, both from a theoretical point of view and for industrial applications. His most remarkable research results include connectivity analysis of robot workspace, formalization and classification of cuspidal robots, classification of 3R manipulators based on homothopy classes, design of isotropic parallel manipulators, design and experiments on tensegrity manipulators inspired from the bird neck. He has led or participated
in several collaborative projects involving roboticists and mathematicians. He has given 26 keynotes or plenary lectures in national and international conferences, workshops and seminars. He has
organized and chaired several international conferences and workshops. He has published 70 papers in international journals andi 200 papers in international conferences.

* Gianluca Antonelli

** Affiliation

ISME, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Cassino, Italy

** Title

« Marine robotics challenges and applications. Current research at the Italian center ISME »

** Abstract

This talk will present the Italian interuniversity center ISME, established in 1999. ISME is composed by 9  Universities and has its background mainly in Systems and Control Engineering, Applied Mechanics and Computer Science. The activities of the ISME researchers will be presented trought brief overviews of some current and recent projects funded by National calls, the Italian Defense and the European Union. Topics will cover, among the others, underwater intervention, multiple vehicles coordination for geophysical applications, asset surveillance.

** Biography

Gianluca Antonelli is Full Professor at the « University of Cassino and Southern Lazio », Italy and Fellow IEEE since 2021. His research interests include marine and industrial robotics, multi-agent systems, identification. He has published more than 50 international journal papers and 130 conference papers, he is author of the book « Underwater Robots » (Springer, 2003, 2006, 2014, 2018) and co-authored the chapter « Underwater Robotics » for the Springer Handbook of Robotics, (Springer, 2008, 2016). From 2016 to 2021 he has been member elected of the « IEEE Robotics & Automation Society » (RAS) Administrative Committee, he has been coordinator of the EuRobotics Topic Group in Marine Robotics, he has been secretary of the IEEE-Italy section, he has been chair of the IEEE RAS Italian Chapter, he has been Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee in Marine Robotics. He served in the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Springer Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics. In October 2021 and 2020, he was top 1% in the field « Industrial Engineering & Automation » according to common metrics and the SCOPUS database.

* Thor I. Fossen

** Affiliation

Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU),  Trondheim, Norway

** Title

« Integral and Adaptive Line-of-sight Guidance Law for Path Following of Aircraft and Marine Craft »

** Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) rely heavily on guidance systems to accomplish desired motion control scenarios such as path following and path tracking. The control objective for path-following applications is to follow a predefined  path specified by waypoints. AUVs and UAVs operate in 3-D. For ships and USVs, it is common to specify a 2-D desired planar path parametrized by straight lines and circle segments (Dubins path).  However, for 3-D
applications, it is standard to assume that altitude/depth is controlled independently such that the path-following objective is limited to motion control in the horizontal plane.

A popular and effective way to achieve convergence to the desired path is to implement a look-ahead line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law mimicking an experienced sailor. The main advantages of LOS guidance laws are simplicity and a small computational footprint. In addition, strong stability properties such as uniform semiglobal exponential stability (USGES) can be proven. This guarantees strong convergence and robustness properties to perturbations.

Vehicle path-following control systems can be implemented using commercial heading and altitude/depth  autopilots in series with the LOS guidance laws.  This talk gives an overview of LOS path-following guidance laws, including recent results on integral LOS (ILOS) and adaptive LOS (ALOS). The ILOS and ALOS guidance laws compensate for drift forces due to wind, waves, and ocean currents. Finally, case studies with marine craft exposed to stochastic ocean currents illustrate the performance of the ILOS and ALOS guidance laws.

** Biography

Thor I. Fossen is a professor of guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) at the Department of Engineering Cybernetics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. He received an M.Sc. in Marine Technology in 1987 and a Ph.D. in Engineering Cybernetics in 1991. Besides cybernetics, Fossen’s field of research is aerospace engineering and marine technology. This includes GNC systems for unmanned vehicles (AUV, UAV, USV), robotics, vehicle dynamics, and inertial navigation systems. He has been a Fulbright
scholar in flight control at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of the University of Washington, Seattle. Fossen is the author of the Wiley textbook Handbook of Marine Craft Hydrodynamics and Motion Control (2021). He is one of the co-founders and former Vice President of R&D of the company Marine  Cybernetics, which DNV acquired in 2012. He is also a co-founder of ScoutDI (2017), which develops drone-based systems for fully digitalized inspections of industrial confined spaces. The Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers elevated him to IEEE Fellow in 2016. He received the Automatica Prize Paper Award in 2002 and the Arch T. Colwell Merit Award in 2008 at the SAE World Congress. He was elected to the
Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences (1998) and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (2022).