Deep into Pharo is the second volume of a series of books covering Pharo. Whereas the first volume is intended for newcomers, this second volume covers deeper topics.
TopicsYou will learn about Pharo frameworks and libraries such as Glamour, PetitParser, Roassal, FileSystem, Regex, and Socket.
You will explore the language with chapters on exceptions, blocks, small integers, and floats.
You will discover tools such as profilers, Metacello and Gofer.
Location: Mines de Douai and ENSTA Brest (France)
Advisor and contacts:
Noury Bouraqadi, Luc Fabresse, Jannik Laval (car _at_ mines-douai.fr, website: http://car.mines-douai.fr/)
Loïc Lagadec (loic.lagadec _at_ 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.
The CAR team (http://car.mines-douai.fr) carries research at the frontier of Software Engineering and Robotics. We study software architectures, languages and tools for controlling individual robots. We have developed an expertise in reflective and dynamic languages, as well as component models, for a modular robotic software architectures. Besides, our research also addresses coordination and cooperation in robotic fleets. We mainly focus on communication models as well as emerging or predefined organizations for multi-agent robotic systems.
The post-doc position is part of the CAIRE project. The goal of the project is to propose innovative solutions for the agile development of robotic software. The study will be validated by developing new robotic-based exploration and mapping solutions.
The candidate must have a PhD in Computer Science or Robotics, should demonstrate strong programming skills, and have research interests in at least one of the following areas:
- modularity and software composition
- programming languages design
- agile software development
- robotic middleware
- control architectures for robots
- multi-agent robotic systems
Important information:
-Workplace : Douai (Lille area), France
-Start: Between May and October 2013
-Duration : 18 months
-Salary approx. 2000 Euros.
To apply, please send your CV + references to : noury (DOT) bouraqadi (AT) mines-douai.fr
This end of the year comes with good news. Our research on robotic exploration and mapping received a two years funding from the Région Nord-Pas de Calais for a proposal entitled: CAIRE. This project that will be kicked off in 2013 involves two other partners: the RMoD team from INRIA Lille, and the Telice team from the IEMN lab of Lille.
The goal of the CAIRE project is to propose a methodology as well as an infrastructure for developing modular software to control robot for building maps of unknown buildings. One originality of our approach is that we fully rely on dynamic languages and more specifically on the Pharo reflective language. Dynamicity enables fast development and eases debugging. Besides, we rely on reflective and meta-level facilities for building tools and adapting the language to fit our needs.
Research we will be conducting in the CAIRE project will complement our previous work on cooperative exploration of unknown terrain using a fleet of robots. CAIRE is also related to our ongoing project RoboShop which aims at experimenting with robots in a shopping mall. In both projects we are using human size wheeled robots. They also share the same middleware: the de facto standard ROS, from the Open Source Robotics Foundation.