Simon Rohou

29 y.o., Brest, France

Passionate about underwater robotics for over thirteen years, I defended a Franco-British PhD thesis about localization methods for underwater robots with set-membership approaches. See more.

Mobile robotics motivates the study of new methods to deal with dynamical systems using a constraint programming approach. I performed a postdoctoral research on this topic at IMT Atlantique/LS2N (Nantes, France).

I am currently an associate professor in Robotics at ENSTA Bretagne (Brest, France) and member of the Robex team in the research laboratory Lab-STICC.

CV: download (french version, September 2019)
Links: GoogleScholar, ResearchGate, HAL, arXiv, GitHub, YouTube

PhD thesis on mobile robotics

Subject: Reliable robot localization: a constraint-programming approach over dynamical systems
Joint PhD between: ENSTA Bretagne/Lab-STICC (France), The University of Sheffield (England)
Funding: Direction Générale de l'Armement (DGA, France)
Thesis defended on Monday, 11 December 2017.

Update (November 2019): the thesis has been published as a book at ISTE Group

Download the manuscript of the thesis (Bibtex)
Download the table of contents of the book
Download the thesis reports
Download the slides
Download the acknowledgements

★ Award of the best PhD thesis in 2017 by the French research community in robotics
Speech (in English) during the award ceremony, 22/11/2018, at CNRS headquarters (Paris):

Tutorial: constraint programming for mobile robotics

Online tutorial during the IROS 2020 Conference
Date: 26th October - 22nd November 2020

IROS conference There are several ways to deal with state estimation in mobile robotics. The constraint programming approach consists of defining a problem as a set of rules and letting a solver perform the estimation. For mobile robotics, rules are constraints coming from state equations or uncertainties from the measurements.

Efforts have been done to propose operators and solvers to apply these constraints. The goal of this tutorial is to learn how to use them and understand the efficiency of the approach on realistic robotic applications. We will see that some problems that are difficult to solve with conventional methods (Kalman filters, particle approaches) can be easily dealt with by constraint programming. This is for instance the case of poor observation measurements, time uncertainties, delays, or when the initial conditions of the system are not known.

The tutorial will stand on the Tubex library, that provides tools for computations over sets of trajectories. It has been designed to deal with dynamical systems defined by non-linear differential equations and involving constraints such as trajectory evaluations, time uncertainties or delays. These computations stand on interval analysis, a well suited tool that reliably propagates uncertainties.

Organizers: Simon Rohou, Raphael Voges, Luc Jaulin, Benoît Desrochers
See the tutorial website

Academic publications

Set-membership terrain-based navigation Simon Rohou
Submitted.
Exact bounded-error continuous-time linear state estimator Simon Rohou, Luc Jaulin
Submitted to Systems & Control Letters, 2020.
Lie symmetries applied to interval integration Julien Damers, Luc Jaulin, Simon Rohou
Submitted to Automatica, 2020.
Towards a generic interval solver for differential-algebraic CSP Simon Rohou, Abderahmane Bedouhene, Gilles Chabert, Alexandre Goldsztejn, Luc Jaulin, Bertrand Neveu, Victor Reyes, Gilles Trombettoni
Published in CP (International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming), 2020. ■ Download preprint. Bibtex. . More. Video.
Set-membership state estimation by solving data association Simon Rohou, Benoît Desrochers, Luc Jaulin
Published in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020. ■ Download preprint. Bibtex. . More. Video.
Reliable robot localization: a constraint-programming approach over dynamical systems Simon Rohou, Luc Jaulin, Lyudmila Mihaylova, Fabrice Le Bars, Sandor M. Veres
Book published at ISTE Group, 2019. ■ Download table of contents. Bibtex. . ★
Proving the existence of loops in robot trajectories Simon Rohou, Peter Franek, Clément Aubry, Luc Jaulin
Published in The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2018. ■ Download preprint. Bibtex. . More.
Reliable non-linear state estimation involving time uncertainties Simon Rohou, Luc Jaulin, Lyudmila Mihaylova, Fabrice Le Bars, Sandor M. Veres
Published in Automatica, 2018. ■ Download preprint. Bibtex. . More.
Guaranteed computation of robot trajectories Simon Rohou, Luc Jaulin, Lyudmila Mihaylova, Fabrice Le Bars, Sandor M. Veres
Published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2017. ■ Download preprint. Bibtex. . More. ★

PhD students

Julien Damers
- Topic: Underwater exploration by a group of robots, without surfacing
- Dates: May 2019 - May 2022
- Co-supervised by: Luc Jaulin (33%), Simon Rohou (33%), Hervé de Forges (33%)
- Funding: CIFRE Kopadia
Verlein Radwan
- Topic: Interval methods, dynamical systems and guaranteed trajectories for robotics and karstic exploration
- Dates: October 2020 - October 2023
- Co-supervised by: Gilles Trombettoni (50%), Lionel Lapierre (25%), Simon Rohou (25%)
- Funding: Région Occitanie, Université de Montpellier

Popular science

Underwater exploration techniques : history and innovations.
October 2019: A flip-flops conference given during the Festival Baie des Sciences at Saint-Brieuc (France).

Talks

04/02/2021 Virtual round tables, Ifremer (Virtual) Single and multi-machine reliability and decisioning strategy, Artificial Intelligence.
31/05/2020 ICRA 2020 (Paris, France (virtual)) Set-membership state estimation by solving data association. Slides. Video.
29/05/2020 Talk in front of the Minister of the Armed Forces (Brest, France) Presentation of research topics related to marine robotics. Video.
22/01/2020 ANR Contredo meeting (Marne-la-Vallée, France) Set-membership state estimation by solving data association. Slides. Video.
02/12/2019 Teaching intervention at École Centrale (Nantes, France) Constraint programming for mobile robotics. Slides. Video.
08/11/2019 Validation of drones and swarms of autonomous drones (Paris, France) Contractor programming for mobile robotics. Slides. Video.
16/10/2019 (keynote speech) National Days of Robotics Research (Vittel, France) Set-membership methods for mobile robotics. Slides. Video.
12/10/2019 Vulgarisation scientifique au festival Baie des Sciences (Saint-Brieuc, France) Techniques d'exploration sous-marine : Histoire et innovations. Slides. Video.
26/07/2019 SWIM 2019 (Palaiseau, France) Verifying loops in robot trajectories under uncertainties. Abstract. Slides.
28/06/2019 French underwater/marine robotics day (Paris, France) Set-membership terrain based navigation. Slides. Video.
21/06/2019 National Days of Robotics Teaching (Toulouse, France) Robotics and hydrographer engineers explore the Guerlédan lake. Abstract. Slides.
26/04/2019 LS2N seminar (Nantes, France) Set-membership terrain based navigation. Slides. Video.
23/04/2019 IBEX days (Nantes, France) The Tubex library. Slides.
03/12/2018 (invited keynote) IEEE OES Conference, USYS’18 (Wuhan, China) Localizing underwater robots with a new bathymetric SLAM approach. Slides.
22/11/2018 ★ Best Thesis Award (GdR Robotique) (Paris, France) Presentation of the thesis during the French Robotics Workshop. Slides. Video.
16/11/2018 JAMACS 2018 (Nantes, France) Verifying loops in robot trajectories under uncertainties. Slides.
12/09/2018 SCAN 2018 (Tokyo, Japan) Dealing with evaluation constraints in uncertain dynamical systems. Abstract. Slides.
27/07/2018 SWIM 2018 (Rostock, Germany) Reliable propagation of time uncertainties in dynamical systems. Abstract. Slides.
12/07/2018 OGRE seminar (Nantes, France) Reliable propagation of time uncertainties in dynamical systems. Slides.
05/04/2018 LS2N seminar (Nantes, France) A temporal approach for the SLAM problem. Slides.
26/01/2018 PhD thesis presentation (Sheffield, UK) Reliable robot localization: a constraint programming approach over dynamical systems. Abstract. Slides.
11/12/2017 PhD thesis defence (Brest, France) Reliable robot localization: a constraint programming approach over dynamical systems. Abstract. Slides.
06/07/2017 IST-Austria Seminar (Wien, Austria) Topological degree theory for loop proof purposes. Slides.
30/06/2017 Talk at IMT Atlantique (Nantes, France) Reliable loop-based localization in very poor environments. Slides.
03/03/2017 ANR Contredo - kickoff (Montpellier, France) Contractor programming over trajectories. Slides.
07/02/2017 TOMS Seminar (Brest, France) A reliable way to compute robot trajectories. Slides.
17/01/2017 DSTL visit (Porton Down, UK) Tube programming applied to underwater localization. Slides.
26/09/2016 SCAN 2016 (Uppsala, Sweden) Tube programming applied to state estimation. Abstract. Slides.
30/06/2016 SHARC 2016 (Brest, France) An overview of the MOOS-IvP middleware. Abstract. Slides.
28/06/2016 Dependability of Complex Robotic Systems (Brest, France) Guaranteed computation of robots trajectories. Slides.
24/06/2016 PRASYS Seminar (Brest, France) Collaborative localization over the seabed: a Walking Strategy. Slides.
09/03/2016 GdR Robotique (Montpellier, France) Wide underwater area exploration with autonomous vehicles: a Walking Strategy. Slides.
16/07/2015 OSM Seminar (Brest, France) Robot localization in an unknown but symmetric environment. Slides.
10/06/2015 SWIM 2015 (Praha, Czech Republic) Robot localization in an unknown but symmetric environment. Abstract. Slides.

Guerlédan project

I am leader of the Guerlédan Project that gathers, twice a year, ENSTA Bretagne's students from Robotics and Hydrography-Oceanography around Guerlédan Lake (Brittany, France).

This offers to the students some unique opportunity to work on realistic challenges involving autonomous robots, hydrographic sensors and nautical resources deployed in such complex environment.

Various issues are dealt with, such as underwater dam inspection, black-box research, hydrographic survey, 3d reconstruction of floodgates, etc.

Software

I am developing the Tubex library: a C++ project providing tools to guarantee computations over sets of trajectories.
See more on the official webpage.

Consortium

Member of the Contredo project (ANR), that gathers several academic and industrial partners with the aim of designing a software tool based on intervals to handle dynamical systems.

Contact

Office M026
ENSTA Bretagne
2, rue François Verny
29806 Brest Cédex 9
Tél: +33(0)2 98 34 87 66

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