In this uncertain time, I feel refreshed to see how resilient communities have been in the face of adversity. Within the scientific community, the shift to virtual hosting of conferences meant I was still able to present my recent (and first!) conference paper at the UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Conference: “Robots into the real world”. The conference is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers, so I felt it was a great opportunity to get some experience in academic writing and presenting. Having joined the group in September, I am glad to get my first publication under my belt and I thoroughly enjoyed presenting my research to an academic audience.
The short publication is entitled “Investigating PID Control for Station Keeping ROVs”, which aims to highlight the performance of PID control in a shallow water environment, when considering the dynamics of the system and with the goal of retaining a stationary position. This work (and another works, currently in progress…) aims to comprehensively study the relation between performance, environmental conditions and vehicle characteristics through non-dimensional analysis, ultimately highlighting that PID control offers insufficient performance. If the offshore industry is to continue the transition towards autonomous operation, there is a key requirement for more advanced control methods to be developed. Future work will focus around developing these control methods, with Model Predictive Control envisioned as the solution for station keeping in shallow and turbulent waters.
As for the conference itself, I really enjoyed the speakers who presented some interesting topics, particularly Prof. Ingmar Posner’s talk which opened the session. It’s also always great seeing the work of your group presented and promoted, which Dr. Adam Stokes touched on during his keynote speech. Even with the Covid-19 situation and attending virtually I still enjoyed my first conference; on the bright side, I was able to sit in my pyjamas for most of the day…
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