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 (car@mines-douai.fr, website: http://car.mines-douai.fr/) Loïc Lagadec (loic.lagadec@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.
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Jannik LAVAL Enseignant-Chercheur Tél. : 03 27 71 26 32
Mines Douai 941 rue Charles Bourseul BP 10838 59508 Douai Cedex _______________________________________________________