Portrait of a doctoral student : Thomas Van Assche
After training as an engineer specializing in Computer Science, Industry and Automation at INSA HDF under the guidance of LAMIH's teacher-researchers, Thomas Van Assche chose to continue his studies and do a PhD at LAMIH.
.It's just a short step from engineering school to doctorate!
Thomas' thesis concerns multi-robot systems, i.e. systems containing several robots that must cooperate to accomplish a global task.
The work involves making each robot capable of navigating using its own information and that of its neighbors only.
Intuitively, the more information a robot has, the better its decisions will be.
In this thesis, we constrain the amount of information available to each robot, to be able to reduce communication costs and increase the system's robustness to technical and environmental problems, while keeping the same efficiency as without this constraint.
The aim is therefore to develop new, fully decentralized control schemes without the need for knowledge about the communication graph and the number of agents in the fleet, by designing distributed estimators.
This cotutelle thesis is co-directed by UPHF and the University of L'Aquila, in Italy. This cotutelle is an opportunity to exchange different perspectives of the problem and different techniques to solve it, which is very enriching.
The applications are numerous: industry of the future, assistance robotics, rescue and surveillance missions
Thomas is one of the many talents at LAMIH, the laboratory specializing in transport and human mobility.
LAMIH thesis supervisor: Michael Defoort
Thesis co-supervisor University of Aquila: Gioardano Pola