PhD Position in 'real-time software in safe and autonomous drones'University of Technology (TU/e,
https://www.tue.nl/en/) is one of Europe's top technological universities, situated at the heart of a most innovative high-tech region, with a wealth of collaborations with industry and academic institutes. In 2017, TU/e was ranked 15th in Europe in the Times Higher Educational World University ranking for Engineering and Technology. TU/e has around 3,000 employees and 2,300 PhD students (half of which international, representing about 70 nationalities).
Electronic Systems group at the TU/eThe Electronic Systems (ES) group consists of seven full professors, one associate professor, eight assistant professors, several postdocs, about 30 PDEng and PhD candidates and support staff. The ES group is world-renowned for its design automation and embedded systems research. It is our ambition to provide a scientific basis for design trajectories of electronic systems, ranging from digital circuits to cyber-physical systems. The group is strongly involved in the electrical engineering bachelor and master programs of the TU/e, as well as in the automotive bachelor program and the embedded systems master program. The group has excellent infrastructure that includes individual computers, computer servers, state-of-the-art FPGA and GPU farms, sensor- and ad-hoc networking equipment, a cyber-physical systems lab, an electronics lab and a comprehensive range of electronic-design software. ES has strong collaborations with industry, research institutes and other universities. Eleven of its staff members have a second affiliation besides their TUE-ES affiliation. The ES group has been very successful in attracting funding for its research through national and international projects and collaborations (EU programs: H2020, ITEA, CATRENE, ECSEL, Artemis, Marie Curie; national programs: NWO, RVO, contract research), for a total budget of around 2M euro per year. The ES group is a multicultural team, with staff members of eight different nationalities and students from all over the world.
Project descriptionThe research is part of the recently granted ECSEL project COMP4DRONES, an international consortium with the participation of TUE, Thales, SIEMENS, BOSCH, HONEYWELL, and others
. COMP4DRONES will develop techologies and
hardware & software architectures for safe & autonomous drones (unmanned areal vehicles). Current drone platforms are composed of multiple loosely-coupled monolithic subsystems (e.g. powerful processors). Instead COMP4DRONES will follow a modular architectural approach inspired from IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics). IMA is based on set of flexible, reusable and interoperable hardware and software resources that, when integrated, meet a defined set of functional, safety and performance requirements. Independent & modular design, verification and execution (
compositionality) will be guaranteed through well-specified interfaces, especially focusing on network and hardware connectivity and a modular system management infrastructure.
The PhD at the Electronic Systems group of the Electrical Engineering faculty will first investigate
safety and modular certification through the composability concept. The CompSOC real-time multi-core platform will the starting point. It is available on (e.g. ZYNQ) FPGAs as well as ASIC. Second, the TUE will investigate
how to make existing drone software frameworks composable and predictable. We will do this by virtualising or combining the CompSOC's microkernel/virtualization with e.g. embedded Linux and data distribution service (DDS), and the Robotic Operating System (ROS/ ROS2).
The position is supervised by Prof.dr. Kees Goossens and dr. Dip Goswami.