Hi Jannik,
btw, another application suitable for Smalltalk GUI and FPGA execution
would be PLCs for automation of industrial plants, which you could
consider to be very large robots. The hardware installation is low
volume compared to robotics applications, but each plant requires many
man-months of consulting for customised software development. See [1]
and [2] (sections on Scan Time, Development, Discrete and analog
signals). Just to stimulate interest.... "factory automation market is
expected to grow from $120.0 billion in 2010 to $185.0 billion in 2016"
[4]. I'd be happy to correspond further off-list.
cheers, Ben
[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introductory_PLC_Programming
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller
[3] http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_6/6.html
[4] http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/factory-automation.asp
jannik.laval wrote:
Dear Smalltalkers,
We are searching for a PhD Student. Following you will find the proposal.
Best regards,
======
Location: Mines de Douai and ENSTA Brest (France)
Advisor and contacts:
Noury Bouraqadi, Luc Fabresse, Jannik Laval (c...@mines-douai.fr, website: http://car.mines-douai.fr/)
Loïc Lagadec (loic.laga...@ensta-bretagne.fr)
Profile: the candidate must hold a recent Master of Science degree in Computer
Science or Software Engineering and must have solid skills in dynamic
reflective language and OOP.
Description of the work:
The goal of this PhD is to study Smalltalk integration with FPGAs for robotic
applications. This integration will enable us get the best from both worlds.
Developers are provided with a high-level dynamic reflective language
(Smalltalk) for building and debugging their applications. Still, we can have
high performances by projecting part of the programs into FPGAs. These
reconfigurable hardware chips can achieve performance faster than C programs,
while consuming much less energy.
The work to do can decompose into the following tasks:
-Build reference robotic applications fully in Pharo Smalltalk using actual
robots (see http://car.mines-douai.fr/robots/)
-Analyze these applications to identify critical parts to project on FPGAs to
significantly increase performances (speed, energy)
-Do the actual projection to FPGA and evaluate performances of the transformed
applications
-Generalize the approach and define a methodology for turning Smalltalk code
into FPGA
-Propose a solution to automate the methodology
The Ph.D student will receive a grant which net amount is approximately 1420
euros per month for 3 years (36 months).
He will be co-supervised by Loïc Lagadec from the ENSTA-Bretagne (Lab-STICC, Brest) and Jannik Laval, Luc Fabresse and Noury Bouraqadi from Ecole des Mines de Douai (CAR, http://car.mines-douai.fr/).
The first 18th month will be spent in Douai (Lille area), while the last half of the PhD will be spent in Brest.
However, during the full 3 years, there will be a strong interaction with
co-supervisers from both labs.
Bibliography:
-A Robust Layered Control System For A Mobile Robot. R. Brooks. IEEE Journal of
Robotics and Automation. Vol. 2. Num 1. March, 1985.
-RCS: A Cognitive Architecture for Intelligent MultiAgent Systems. J.S. Albus
and A. J. Barbera. Proceedings of the 5th IFAC/EURON Symposium on Intelligent
Autonomous Vehicles (IAV 2004). Lisbon, Portugal, 2004.
-Handbook of Robotics. Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib editors. Springer.
2008.
-Multi-Level Simulation of Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Platforms. D. Picard
and L. Lagadec. International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing. 2012.
-High-level synthesis for FPGAs: From Prototyping to Deployment. Jason cong and
stephen neuendorffer and juanjo noguera and kees vissers and zhiru zhang. IEEE
Transactions on Computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems. Vol.
30. Num 4. April, 2011.
-The MOLEN Polymorphic Processor. S. Vassiliadis and S. Wong and G. Gaydadjiev
and K. Bertels and G. Kuzmanov and E. Moscu Panainte. IEEE Transactions on
Computers. 2004.
_______________________________________________________
Jannik LAVAL
Enseignant-Chercheur
Tél. : 03 27 71 26 32
Mines Douai
941 rue Charles Bourseul
BP 10838
59508 Douai Cedex
_______________________________________________________
