Me
I am a PhD student carrying out a thesis resulting from a collaboration between the Solvay company and the Auctus team.
I started my thesis in the Auctus team in September 2021. I worked as a software development engineer in the team between 2020 and 2021. In 2020, I graduated as a robotic engineer from the engineering school ENSTA Bretagne, and I also validated the Master Dynamics and Signals System proposed by the University of Angers.
More details about my thesis
PhD title: Robotic approach for the formulation of new solvents
Abstract:
Today, one of the challenges of robotics is the ability to assist expert operators in increasingly sophisticated tasks. This implies to question not only what constitutes the expertise of an operator for a given task, but also the possible contribution of an automated system to assist the operators in this task.
An interesting example of expertise is the task of searching for solvents for chemical compounds, which is one of the fields of expertise of the Solvay company. This consists of characterizing the solubility of a chemical compound in a set of solvents, in order to determine precisely the affinities of this compound and therefore the optimal solvent for it. This task, based on visual, cognitive and manual expertise, is performed by a small number of expert technicians within the company. However, performing this task relies on an empirical, tedious and sometimes dangerous process.
Using this task as an application framework, this thesis will seek to answer the following theoretical questions: (1) What are the constituent elements of an operator’s expertise (2) How can an automated system be able to partially reproduce this expertise in order to support this expert in performing his task.
The objectives of this thesis are multiple. On the one hand, it will identify the components of this expertise, and evaluate for which an automated assistance would be the most beneficial. On the other hand, it will be a question of testing and proposing semi-automated solutions reproducing this expertise, to assist them in the realization of this task. The validation of the solutions must show their feasibility in a realistic environment including a study of the acceptance of the solutions by the operators.