PhD Candidate in Multi-Robot Informative Planning for Coastal Monitoring

Doctorat / PhD Profil chercheur : First Stage Researcher (R1) Type de contrat : Temporary Date limite de candidature : 30 Nov 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Oslo) Programme UE : Not funded by a EU programme Référence : Horizon Europe MSCA, HORIZON-MSCA-2024-DN-01-01, 101226989 Département : Department of ICT and Natural Sciences Domaine : Computer science

This is NTNU NTNU is a broad-based university with a technical-scientific profile and a focus in professional education. The university is located in three cities with headquarters in Trondheim. At NTNU, 8,6000 employees and 44,000 students work to create knowledge for a better world. You will find more information about working at NTNU and the application process here. About the position The Department of ICT and Natural Sciences (IIR) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Ålesund is opening a PhD position in distributed informative planning for teams of autonomous and remotely operated marine vehicles, with applications in coastal environmental monitoring. Coastal waters and fjords change continuously. Pollutants spread, floating litter drifts with wind and currents, and water quality and biological activity vary across both space and time. A single vehicle can only observe a small part of such an environment at once. Teams of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), supported by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), can cover larger areas, observe processes from several viewpoints at the same time, and respond to what they detect. To use such teams effectively, the vehicles must build a shared and predictive picture of the environment and decide together where each of them should go next. They must do this under the real constraints of the marine environment, including limited communication, changing weather and heterogeneous vehicles. The position is part of NTNU Ålesund’s work on ocean intelligence: collecting data about the ocean to support use cases such as monitoring of fish spawning grounds, mapping of microplastics and suspended contamination and water quality monitoring. The position builds on ongoing research at the department on autonomous surface vehicles, informative path planning, online mapping of spatial fields and tracking of drifting targets, which has been validated in field trials. The PhD project will extend these methods from single vehicles to cooperating teams of heterogeneous vehicles. The research will combine theory, simulation and field experiments. Field work will be carried out in coastal waters near Ålesund with the department's fleet of USVs and UAVs. The successful candidate will contribute to one or more of the following areas: Multi-robot coordination for monitoring spatially and temporally varying phenomena, such as drifting objects, pollutant plumes and evolving environmental fields, including distributed informative path and trajectory planning. Mobile robot sensing, mapping and active decision making for heterogeneous teams of USVs and UAVs, using…