The DRAMCO research group at KU Leuven’s Department of Electrical Engineering in Gent, Belgium, opens a research position for a talented and motivated individual to join our team as a PhD researcher. Continuously driven by questions from and contacts with industrial partners, the mission of DRAMCO is to cover a broad range of research topics in wireless, mobile and embedded communications. The goal is to make new technologies accessible for industrial partners by applied research projects and further develop these technologies by more fundamental research in PhD projects. We are involved in bilateral and collective research on national and international level.
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Project
Location-Based Services gain unprecedented popularity across industrial, medical, and commercial domains. In this landscape, the watchwords are robustness and reliability. Recent indoor positioning systems achieve good average characteristics (good accuracy), but show a large variance and many outliers (bad precision). Market needs indicate that improved accuracy is required. Moreover, cumbersome procedures involved in mapping the indoor scene, and keeping these maps up to date, hampers the broad adoption of indoor positioning systems today.
The POMPOEN project pursues a disruptive approach to perform positioning operations in combination with charging of nodes adopting non-conventional hybrid RF-acoustic signaling, taking energy-neutrality at the mobile node side as a prerequisite. In this project, novel architectural concepts and algorithmic approaches are designed for precise and reliable 3D positioning and mapping. The project develops novel hybrid RF-acoustic concepts involving both beacons and devices and adopting learning techniques to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of the environment.
It is in this latter part of the POMPOEN project that the PhD vacancy is situated. State of the art indoor positioning systems, adopting both conventional signal processing or learning methods, typically rely on some form of environmental knowledge to improve the positioning performance. This ranges from basic knowledge of room shapes and dimensions to detailed fingerprints. The requirement to know the environment raises installation and maintenance effort. The concept of SLAM to automate the procedures to a large extent, could benefit indoor positioning greatly.
Algorithms automatically deriving room shapes from the room impulse response assume the walls to be planar, and specular reflectors using virtual sources to model reflections. However, existing algorithms lack the modeling of local diffuse scatters that have a large influence on the positioning reliability and precision. This has gained our interest as it can benefit from the progress in (deep) learning and datadriven methods, and intrinsically take into account both direct and reflected paths. Hybrid RF-acoustic signaling, that can benefit from the different propagation characteristics of the radio and sound waves,offers an interesting diversity. Further optimization can be achieved by a possible fusion of acoustic impulse response algorithms and RF-mapping of the environment with Radio Tomographic Imaging.
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As aforementioned, the PhD position situates in the algorithmic side of the project and aims to answer the question: Can hybrid RF-acoustic SLAM efficiently and effectively deliver adequate knowledge on the (changing) indoor environment. In this light, we are looking for PhD students with the following requirements:
- You hold a master’s degree in engineering (electrical engineering, electronics, telecommunication, computer science) or equivalent and graduated with distinction or equivalent.
- You are fluent in English, both spoken and written.
- Having expertise in the research domain is an added bonus.
- You can demonstrate a critical yet open-minded approach to research.
- You posses an eagerness to learn and explore a broad range of research topics.
- You can cooperate well with colleagues and look forward to both theoretical work and experimental validation.
Offer
What can you aspect from this PhD?
- A fully-funded full-time position for 1 year, prolonged to 4 years upon positive evaluation.
- A young, inclusive and dynamic research team that supports you in successfully obtaining a PhD degree via a proper scientific training at a top-ranked university.
- Conducting research in engineering-related environment, extent your knowledge through extracurricular courses provided by the Arenberg Doctoral School, with the opportunity for professional development and growth.
- Participate in a larger multidisciplinary project, and receive supervision of multiple PIs.
- The expediency to participate at national and international meetings/conferences, and establish your own network.
You can find more information on a PhD scholarship at the KU Leuven on our jobsite and PhD landing page.
General information on PhDs at KU Leuven
Information on PhDs in Science Engineering and Technology at KU Leuven
Interested?
For more information please contact Prof. dr. ir. Liesbet Van der Perre, tel.: +32 9 331 65 54, mail: liesbet.vanderperre@kuleuven.be or Prof. dr. ir. Lieven De Strycker, tel.: +32 9 267 27 11, mail: lieven.destrycker@kuleuven.be.
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