PhD position: concurrent programming (SCOOP) for robotics
The ETH Chair of Software Engineering has won a grant from the Hasler foundation, in a joint project with the Technical University of Lucerne and the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH, to develop a robotics framework involving concurrent computation. The project, called Roboscoop, will produce a demonstrator system: a “SmartWalker” robot — a robotic version of “walkers” used by elderly people and others with reduced mobility. The research proposal is available [2].
One of the major goals of the Roboscoop framework is to provide robotics applications with the full possibilities of concurrent programming. Many robotics developments use no or little concurrency because of the tricky programming involved in using threads, and the difficulty of getting applications right. With SCOOP [1] programmers have a simple, high-level mechanism that removes the risk of data races and other plagues of concurrent programming.
We are looking for someone with a strong background in both software engineering and robotics. If you are interested, please see the position announcement [3].
References
[1] On SCOOP see here and here. See also a YouTube video of a small robot programmed with SCOOP as part of an earlier student project (by Ganesh Ramanathan).
[2] Roboscoop research proposal, here.
[2] Position announcement: here
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It looks like the video was removed from YouTube. I would be curious to see it.
-brian
Thanks for pointing this out; I don’t know what happened but hope the video is restored later today.
The video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWkETPn5Fn8. I have updated the text of the original post.