The Researchlab Autonomous Shipping at Delft University of Technology offers a PhD position on Collaborative Control for Autonomous Ships in Multi-Vessel Environments.
Over the last decade autonomous shipping has started to receive significant attention in view of improving efficiency challenges in the transport domain. Nowadays research places many efforts on the technological development and improvement of maneuvering and intelligent control for individual autonomous ships. At the same time, it is expected that the future autonomous ships will not be operating only by themselves, but will be navigating in (sometimes crowded) multi-vessel environments, encountering numerous other waterway users and infrastructure operators (e.g. in large port areas such as the Port of Rotterdam, or in inner-city waterway networks as found in the city of Amsterdam).
Moving towards this future situation in which both autonomous and human-operated ships are operating on and around waterways, the investigation and integration of new ways of interaction between autonomous ships and their environments in control methods, and being able to provide insight in guarantees on transport safety and efficiency in a society with sustainability considerations, become more and more important.
As PhD researcher in this project, you will focus on investigating the potential of vessel to vessel (v2v) and vessel to infrastructure (v2i) interactions in view of addressing these challenges at an operational level. You will have the opportunity to investigate smart operational control strategies for collaborative autonomous shipping, integrating navigation rules, information exchange and algorithms for dealing with the uncertainties. Here, concepts such as (distributed) model predictive control are in particular pursued as the central concept to advance the state of the art in performance of multi-vessel systems and surrounding logistics.
This PhD position will contribute to the fundamental research, while assessing the potential of investigated methods using high-fidelity simulations and experimental validation with the autonomous vessel fleet of the Researchlab Autonomous Shipping (RAS, http://rasdelft.nl/) at TU Delft. The research will be carried out in close cooperation with academic and industrial partners of several large European research projects (such as NOVIMOVE, AVATAR, and AutoBarge).
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