Sixth Coffee with EUMR

The EUMarineRobots (EUMR) project is glad to announce the sixth “Coffee with EUMR” webinar on Friday, 23 April 2021 at 10:30 CET. This webinar will be hosted by  Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and will consist of a short talk by NTNU and two short invited talks by end-users of TNAs performed at NATO STO CMRE. The first talk titled "Risk management and supervisory risk control of AUVs for Arctic operations" will be given by Jens Einar Bremnes. The two other short talks will be given by two TNA end-users at invitation of NATO STO CMRE. The second talk is titled "Adaptive power allocation in multi-user acoustic channels" and will be given by Dr. Antony Pottier, and the third talk titled "Channel State Information acquisition in bidirectional underwater acoustic communication systems" will be given by Dr. Beatrice Tomasi, both from the Higher Institute for Electronics and Digital Training (ISEN).

Please use this link to join the meeting.

The abstracts of the talks and short speakers' biographies follow: 

Abstract "Risk management and supervisory risk control of AUVs for Arctic operations"

There has been an increasing interest in conducting scientific research in Arctic and Antarctic areas. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are efficient sensor-carrying platforms for data gathering under sea ice. However, there are many operational challenges associated with this: unstructured environments, remoteness, cold, inaccessibility due to ice covers, and degraded performance of navigation sensors. How can the vehicle and the human operators deal with these challenges? In this EUMR coffee, Jens will present his ongoing research on risk aspects and risk control for Arctic operations of autonomous vehicles under sea-ice. 

Jens Einar Bremnes received his M.Sc. degree in Marine Technology from NTNU in 2019, specializing in marine cybernetics. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Marine Technology at NTNU. His research interests include guidance, navigation, control and risk management applied to Arctic operations of autonomous underwater vehicles.

Abstract "Adaptive power allocation in multi-user acoustic channels"

The experiments led at the LOON will be described along with the channel sounding method employed to extract channel impulse responses from the recorded data. These responses will used to study the performance of adaptive power allocation in a 2 user interference channel under different channel state information assumptions.

Antony Pottier received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the École Nationale Supérieure des Sciences Appliquées et de Technologie, Lannion, France, in 2013 and the Ph.D. degree from IMT Atlantique (formerly known as Telecom Bretagne), Brest, France, in 2018. From 2014 to 2015, he was a Research Engineer at Telecom Bretagne, Brest, France, where he worked on underwater acoustic communications. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institut Supérieur de l'Electronique et du Numérique (ISEN), Brest, France. His research interests are in the fields of digital communications and signal processing and their application to underwater acoustic systems.

Abstract "Channel State Information acquisition in bidirectional underwater acoustic communication systems"

The presentation will briefly cover the experiments that collected 137 GB of acoustic recordings, measuring the quality of channel state information (CSI) at transmitter in bidirectional underwater acoustic communication systems. We focus on CSI reciprocity, coherence time, coherence bandwidth and we compare two CSI acquisition strategies. Preliminary results suggest that using outdated transmit CSI is better than using recent receive CSI.

Dr Beatrice Tomasi received her PhD on Information Technology and Science at University of Padova, Italy, in 2012. She worked on underwater acoustic communications and networks since 2008 until the Office of Naval Research postdoctoral fellowship in 2013 conducted at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA. From 2015 to 2017 she researched CSI acquisition techniques for the 5th Generation (5G) of cellular networks at the Huawei European Research Laboratory, Paris, France. From 2018 to 2020, she worked on Marine Technologies at the Norwegian Research Center (NORCE), Bergen, Norway. Today, she is associate professor at the Institut Supérieur de l'Electronique et du Numérique (ISEN), Brest, France. Her research interests are control, information, and estimation theory for wireless communications, underwater acoustic and optical propagations, navigation and communication systems for marine robotics, ocean observatories.