PhD Position Sensor Fusion for Ship State Estimation

Challenge: Using sensor fusion to improve estimates of wave environment, vessel loading and structural response, and for identification of state-space models of vessel dynamics.
Change: Provide a practical blueprint for smart on-board sensing feeding into digital twin modelling, leading to increased vessel safety and life span as well as a decrease in cost and waste.
Impact: Leading to a safer, cleaner, and more cost-efficient society.

In the maritime field, exciting new possibilities arise with increasing availability of on-board sensors, enabling the estimation of ship state factors like wave excitation and resulting vessel loading and structural response. Challenges lie in the facts that the wave environment inherently introduces system nonlinearities as well as model uncertainties, and sensor measurements are noisy and potentially biased or faulty. To solve this, the maritime field is currently in a transition to developing more advanced sensor fusion algorithms, enabling the anticipation of real-life situations. This way, vessel life span and safety can be increased while costs and waste are kept as low as possible. We need you as a skillful control engineer to make this happen.

Much is still to be explored in this area, as the vessel state-space models themselves need to be derived and applicable sensor fusion algorithms need to be developed. This is where you come in. This position offers you the unique opportunity of bringing two worlds together: automatic control and maritime systems. You will thus lay the foundation of something completely new. This position is a great opportunity if you are a true pioneer with strong technical and leading skills. You will conduct fundamental research in the field of sensor fusion for maritime applications to solve very practical problems. The solutions you develop will be applied in real-life situations for ship structural health monitoring.

This interdisciplinary PhD position emerges from a collaboration between the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC ) and the Maritime & Transport Technology (MTT ) department within the faculty of 3mE at TU Delft. Working closely with advisors from DCSC and MTT, you will further develop vessel state-space models and design sensor systems and algorithms for estimating wave energy spectrum and vessel structural response. Your next step will be to validate this system based on physical model tests. You will benefit from two research departments and have access to a lot of expertise. Also, you will collaborate with a large group of stakeholders, among whom are industry partners, research institutes, governmental organizations, ship builders, and more. Your base will be the maritime department of the 3mE faculty.