PhD student position in situated autonomous systems, Gothenburg (Sweden)

A fully funded 5-year Ph.D. position in Computer Science and Engineering with the subject “Space-Aware Synthesis of Situated Autonomous Systems” is open at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden. We are looking for excellent and motivated candidates. This is a joint call at our department with several projects and is limited to a maximum of 4 projects being funded in this round. The Ph.D. position advertised will be hosted by the Formal Methods (FM) research unit and supervised by Dr. Yehia Abd Alrahman.

The objective of the Ph.D. project is to develop novel methods and algorithms for automatic production of correct-by-design situated autonomous systems. That is, systems that live on autonomous machines (such as robots) and populate a shared physical space. Such machines can influence each other by merely moving/modifying the space. Situated Autonomous systems are expected to operate while co-existing with other machines and/or humans. Thus, there is a pressing demand to make them safe, reliable, and robust to sudden changes. Testing is very expensive and is shown to have low coverage in distributed settings. We will use Formal Methods instead, and more specifically Controller Synthesis as a design technique. Our goal is to extend existing synthesis techniques to permit native reasoning about time-space related design properties. The work in this project is on the intersection of computer science, control theory, and AI.