[alife] PhD position in Computer Science at University of Toulouse

[Sylvain Cussat-Blanc]

The University of Toulouse (France) has an open doctoral position available in VORTEX team to work on behavioral regulation applied to flying drones.

Project description:
This project aims to explore in simulation new models of autonomous systems composed of multiple drones (or agents) having various capacities (sensors and/or actuators). The goal of the system is to organize a robot swarm in order to collaboratively realize a given mission.
The principles that will be used in this project are targeted to be bio-inspired control systems and more specifically “morphogenetic engineering” systems. Both online and offline learning methods will be tested. In a theoretical point of view, the candidate will have to imagine and design learning systems able to produce in a reasonable time the full system behavior. This behavior will then be implemented in the robots in order to be evaluated in real-world problems. 
This project also aims to study resilience capacities of the swarm as well as its capacity to continuously learn from changes (environment or mission). A team of R&D engineers will support the realization of the robotic swarms as well as specific simulation modules.

Supervisors:
	•	Dr. Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Associate professor at University of Toulouse, sylvain.cussat-blanc at irit.fr
	•	Dr. Stéphane Sanchez, Associate professor at University of Toulouse, stephane.sanchez at irit.fr
	•	Pr. Hervé Luga, Full professor at University of Toulouse, herve.luga at irit.fr

Candidate profile:
We seek a candidate with a (research) master in artificial intelligence, computer science, robotics or related area. The candidate must have excellent programming skills, preferably in c++ and should have some experience designing agent-based models and/or robotic systems. Engineering skills are also welcomed.

Employment terms:
The candidate will be offered a temporary 3-year contract. The candidate will be registered at University of Toulouse as Doctorate student. They will receive a minimum gross salary of 23484€ per year. This salary includes all the social benefits (health care, retirement plan, etc.) provided by the French government.

Application:
Additional information about the position can be obtained from the supervisors by email (see supervisor section). To apply to this position, send you CV and motivation letter by email to the supervisors.

Biography:
	• 	Martin Delecluse. Autonomous and Robust Control Architecture for Multi-Robot System. Engineer thesis, ISAE, September 2013.
	• 	Stéphane Sanchez, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc. Gene Regulated Car Driving: Using a Gene Regulatory Network to Drive a Virtual Car. In: Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, Springer, Vol. 15 N. 2, June 2014.
	• 	Y. Jin, H. Guo, and Y. Meng, “A hierarchical gene regulatory network for adaptive multi- robot pattern formation”, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 805–816, 2012.
	• 	Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Jordan Pollack. Cracking the Egg: Virtual Embryogenesis of Real Robots. In: Artificial Life, MIT Press, USA, Vol. 20 N. 3, July 2014.
	• 	Bredeche, Nicolas, et al. "Roborobo! a fast robot simulator for swarm and collective robotics." arXiv preprint arXiv:1304.2888 (2013).
	• 	Kushleyev, Alex, et al. "Towards a swarm of agile micro quadrotors."Autonomous Robots 35.4 (2013): 287-300.
	• 	Clune, Jeff, et al. "Evolving coordinated quadruped gaits with the HyperNEAT generative encoding." Evolutionary Computation, 2009. CEC'09. IEEE Congress on. IEEE, 2009.
	• 	David B. D’Ambrosio, Skyler Goodell, Joel Lehman, Sebastian Risi, Kenneth O. Stanley. "Multirobot Behavior Synchronization through Direct Neural Network Communication", Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications (ICIRA-2012). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag, 2012.
	• 	Fabien Flacher, Olivier Sigaud: GACS, an evolutionary approach to the spatial coordination of agents. AAMAS 2005: 1109-1110

Sylvain Cussat-Blanc
Stéphane Sanchez
Hervé Luga