Dr. Ahmed Chemori of LIRMM

Underwater vehicles have gained a widespread interest in the last decades, from various research communities (design, actuation, communication, perception, modelling, navigation, control, etc), given the multiple tasks they can accomplish. Their applications are multiple in different fields, such as underwater inspection, oil and gas offshore industry, aquaculture, wind parks, hydroelectric power stations, underwater archeology, ocean cartography, air crash and environmental investigations, etc.

One of the potential applications of these systems deals with inspection of underwater facilities such as bridges, hydraulic dams, Ship hulls, aquatic environments, etc. When we are interested in autonomous control of underwater vehicles, different challenges may arise. These challenges are mainly due to the inherent high nonlinearities and time varying behavior of the vehicle’s dynamics subject to hydrodynamic effects and external disturbances.  In order to avoid the degradation in the performance of the controlled system during a specific mission, the vehicle is expected to possess a certain robustness and a self-tuning ability to compensate for different kinds of uncertainties, parameters variation and external disturbances. That is why robust/adaptive controllers are widely used for such complex systems.

This talk will be focused mainly on motion control of small underwater vehicles for inspection applications. It will be focused on (i) general context, (ii) control problem formulation, (iii) related challenges (iv) control design issues and proposed solutions, and finally (v) validation of the proposed control solutions through real-time experiments.

Biography:

Dr. Ahmed Chemori received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees, both in automatic control from Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, France, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. During the year 2004/2005 he has been a Research and Teaching assistant at Laboratoire de Signaux et Systèmes (LSS - Centrale Supelec) and University Paris 11. Then he joined Gipsa-Lab (Former LAG) as a CNRS postdoctoral researcher. He is currently a tenured research scientist in Automatic control and Robotics for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics (LIRMM). His research interests include nonlinear (robust, adaptive, and predictive) control and their real-time applications in robotics (underactuated, parallel, underwater, humanoid and wearable robots). He is the author of more than 145 scientific publications, including international journals, patents, book chapters and international conferences. He served as a TPC/IPC member and associate editor for different international conferences and he organized different scientific events in the topics of his research interests.

Email:

Address:161 rue Ada, , Montpellier Cedex 5,, France, 34095