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Daniel SIMON

Organisation: INRIA
Research Center: Sophia Antipolis-Méditerrannée
Project-team:
CAMIN

(+33) 04 67 14 97 63 (+33) 04 67 14 85 00

*Research topics
I am researcher with the
CAMIN team hosted by LIRMM in Montpellier. My interest mainly lies in control and real-time processing co-design, including software architectures for process control, robotics and embedded real-time systems, and real-time simulation.

Beyond the traditional approach based on a separation of concern between control and real-time computing, a better integration between these two disciplines is necessary to cope with the constraints involved in embedded systems and mobile devices. Among the various aspects of real-time, one of prime interest is the scheduling policy used to implement the closed-loop control laws, which are mainly periodic. Feedback scheduling is an emerging scheduling method, where the scheduling parameters, such as the tasks period, is adapted on-line according to an application-dependent criterion. In particular, it is expected that this method will be efficient to schedule systems with timely uncertain repetitive behaviour, e.g., in visual servoing. Two pionnering sources about this topic are control lab. at Lund for the control side and University of Virginia for the computing side.

Within the topic of control&computing co-design, I was involved in Safe-NECS, an ANR funded collaborative project dealing with the coordinated design of safe distributed control systems, in which a testbed will be a quadrirotor aerial drone developed at GIPSA-lab. Another project was ARAVIS where control loops are deeply integrated in high density silicon chips, and the integration of control capabilities both in operating systems and web services was the topic of a cooperation with the SARDES team.

For a long time my favorite application field has been Underwater Robotics which led to several collaborative projects with the Robotics Service (PRAO) at Ifremer: within this application field the CONNECT project (funded by the ANR) focused on the control of multi-agent systems gathering underwater, surface and aerial autonomous vehicles. I was also involved in the IST FP7 project FeedNetBack, in particular I was the coordinator of the "Control and Computing Co-design" workpackage with the Control Departments of University of Sevilla and of ETH in Zurich. I currently have a collaboration with the SubseaTech company in Marseille about the optimization and control co-design of a small inspection ROV.

Along these years I was a designer and developer of ORCCAD, a software environment aimed to design, verify, simulate and generate real-time code for complex robotic applications. It is jointly developed with SED engineers at Inria Grenoble Rhône-Alpes. Although primarily developed as a toolbox for real-time in robotics, Orccad has been easily customized to cope with control&scheduling co-design related features. It has been a precious support for this research, especially through the design and implementation of hardware-in-the-loop simulators involving robotic devices and feedback schedulers.
Real-time simulation of hybrid dynamic systems was the topic of the PhD thesis prepared by Abir Ben Khaled at IFP- Énergies Nouvelles (IFPEN), whose I was thesis advisor.

With the DEMAR team, I was involved in the Sensas/Sensbio ADT project, where I am investigating attitude reconstruction from IMU sensors over wireless links. I am also working on flexible and controlled schedulers for distributed Functional Electrical Stimulation. I also developed a software framework for the realistic simulation of FES based distributed system. Such hybrid simulation software consistently gathers bio-mechanical components (such as muscles and bones) together with the numerical control architecture (CPUs and links). It is intended to ease the design, tuning and validation of feedback control loops involving disabled, as in the AGILIS project to be started in 2019.


*Here are some selected publications.

[Control&Computing Co-Design] Daniel Simon, Alexandre Seuret and Olivier Sename, "Real-time control systems: feedback, scheduling and robustness", International Journal of Systems Science, Taylor & Francis, 2017, DOI 10.1080/00207721.2017.1316879.

[Feedback schedulers] Sylvain Durand, Anne-Marie Alt, Daniel Simon, Nicolas Marchand. "Energy-aware Feedback Control for a H.264 Video Decoder", International Journal of Systems Science (2013)

[Orccad seminal paper] D. Simon, B. Espiau, E. Castillo and K. Kapellos, "Computer-Aided Design of a Generic Robot Controller Handling Reactivity and Real-Time Control Issues", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Vol 1, no 4 , pages 213-229, December 1993.


and a few talks


Any question?

* PhD students


Educational Background
I graduated as Engineer from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et Microtechniques , Besançon (1976) and as Doctor-engineer from Université de Franche-Comté with the L.A.B. (1980). I got in 1998 for the "Habilitation a Diriger des Recherches" from Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis.

2014-12-03