Meet our next ESRs and find out more about their projects:
Viswa Narayanan Sankaranarayanan (ESR15)
Viswa Narayanan Sankaranarayanan received B. Tech. in Electronics and Instrumentation engineering from SRM University, Chennai, India, in 2015. Since then he worked as a software engineer at KPIT Technologies, Bangalore, India. He received his MS by Research in Electronics and Communication Engineering at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.
He is currently a PhD student at Lulea University of Technology, Lulea, Sweden. His research interests include adaptive-robust control, time-delay systems. switched systems and their applications in drones.
His PhD research will be focused on "Drone based Robust Control Schemes against varying time delays". The problem to be handled is to ensure the stability and efficiency in operating the drones in situations that involve time-delays.
The major objective of the research work is to implement control designs for autonomous and remotely operated drones that are robust to all the time delays, It will also explore switching systems to ensure robustness towards varying time-delays.
Julien Mellet (ESR12)
JJulien is a Ph.D. candidate at the University Frederico II in Naples, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies.
He recently completed two Master of Science in Industrial and Aerospace Engineering, one at the National Institute of Applied Science (INSA Centre Val de Loire) in France and the other one at the Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in China.
During his studies, he had the opportunity to complete two professional experiences. He firstly worked as a research engineer at ISIR - Sorbonne University, in the Multiscale Interaction Lab, then he worked as a software developer for Thales, mainly developing the ground control station for their drone swarm project.
His Ph.D. project aims to ease operator tasks while piloting a team of aerial manipulators, proposing shared control methods. In particular,
• Development of a haptic control framework for a single user to multi-aerial manipulator mission.
• Evaluation of the effect of time delays on multi-robot collaboration physically interacting with each other and the environment.
• Development of the telemanipulation control strategies using multi-modal user information for distributed system coordination by a remote user.
Hameed Ullah (ESR2)
Hameed Ullah received his BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Peshawar, Pakistan in 2015 and his MS in Electrical Engineering (Control Systems) from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan in 2019. He worked as Research Associate (RA) from March 2018 to September 2021 at UAVs and Robotic Lab at College Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, NUST, where he focused on the design of linear and robust nonlinear control techniques for robotic systems like UAVs, Quadrotor and robotic manipulators.
Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the PRISMA Lab at Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology-DIETI, University of Naples Federico II–UNINA. His main research includes modeling and control of aerial manipulators in the presence of external disturbances and aerodynamic effects.
Hameed’s project focuses on the stabilization and control of aerial manipulators in contact with the environment for on-site measurements.
The main objectives of the project are:
• Design a model-based control for an aerial device or an aerial manipulator while interacting with the environment for on-site measurements.
• Study aerodynamic hurdles caused by the proximity of the floating platform with the surrounding environment, preventing even simple perching operations.
• Develop estimators of unmodeled aerodynamic effects and external disturbances and test them in real life experiments.
Check out all our ESR projects here.