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Dr. Minh Duc HUA (view CV here)
Chargé de Recherche (CR1) CNRS
Member of SIS team
Project: OSCAR

Adresse: Laboratoire I3S
               2000 route des Lucioles
               Les Algorithmes - Euclide B, BP121
               06903 Sophia Antipolis, France

Email: hua(at)i3s.unice.fr
Google Scholar: view here
Researchgate: view here


Short biography:
Dr. Minh Duc Hua received the Engineering degree from the Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France, in 2009. After two post-doctoral years with the "Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes de Sophia-Antipolis" (I3S UCA-CNRS Laboratory), Sophia Antipolis, and a short research stay with Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia, he joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 2011, where he currently holds a tenured research position (CR). He was assigned to the Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR UPMC-CNRS), Paris, France, from 2011 to 2016. He is currently with the I3S UCA-CNRS Laboratory. His research interests include nonlinear control, sensor-based control, nonlinear observer, and computer vision, with applications to unmanned aerial vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles. His h-index is 25 and his papers have been cited more than 2200 times.

Dr. Hua was recognized as the "Outstanding Reviewer for the year 2017" by the Automatica journal --the best journal in Automatic Control along with IEEE TAC. He was awarded "Editor's Choice Paper for May 2020" of the Automatica journal and the "3rd Kimura Best Paper Award" of the Asian Journal of Control for his contributions on nonlinear observers for homography estimation. Based on these algorithms, he has created the "HomographyLab" software (http://homographylab.i3s.unice.fr) that has been the object of technology transfer to ECA Robotics --the French biggest robotics company. HomographyLab is at the heart of some challenging robotics applications that Dr. Hua has successfully developed within the I3S-OSCAR team such as vision-based landing of a quadrotor UAV on a moving platform (https://youtu.be/vmjn-ZUIQ7g) and homography-based stabilization of an underactuated underwater vehicle (https://youtu.be/sBgM0Q30VVM).

During the second spell at the I3S laboratory (cf. since 2016), the focus of Dr. Hua has been devoted to the creation of Underwater Robotics activities within the I3S laboratory. Thanks to his contributions, the I3S laboratory now proudly takes part of very few underwater robotics laboratories in France capable of carrying out significant experimental demonstrations in real challenging conditions using their own robots and facilities. The underactuated underwater robot "X-Challenger" capable of performing fixed-point stabilization with respect to either a planar or a 3D target using vision and without linear velocity measurements is a remarkable feat of Dr. Hua and his collaborators, making them the first in the world to overcome such a difficult challenge.


 
Headline News
 
 
 
 

Automatical journal paper "Nonlinear observer design on SL(3) for homography estimation by exploiting point and line correspondences with application to image stabilization" (M.-D. Hua et al.) has been awarded Editor's Choice Paper for May 2020

 
  • Software/Library HomographyLab Version 1.0 (Proprietary Licence) is released (Contact me for more information). Check here
  • Website for Astrid CONGRE project available at https://www.i3s.unice.fr/congre
  • ROS driver for DVL Nortek 1000 successfully written by our team.
  • Submitted CDC'2019 paper "A homography-based dynamic control approach of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles observing a (near) vertical target without linear velocity measurements" (L.-H. Nguyen, M.-D. Hua, T. Hamel).
  • Accepted ECC'2019 paper "A nonlinear control approach for trajectory tracking of slender-body axisymmetric underactuated underwater vehicles" (L.-H. Nguyen, M.-D. Hua, T. Hamel).
  • Automatica journal paper "Nonlinear observer design on SL(3) for homography estimation by exploiting point and line correspondences with application to image stabilization" (M.-D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony, P. Morin) "provisionally accepted" as Regular Paper.
  • Submitted journal paper "A homography-based dynamic control approach applied to station keeping of autonomous underwater vehicles without linear velocity measurements" (L.-H. Nguyen, M.-D. Hua, G. Allibert, T. Hamel) to IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
  • Submitted journal paper "Homography estimation of a moving planar scene from direct point correspondence" (S. de Marco, M.-D. Hua, T. Hamel, R. Mahony) to IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.
 
 
 

Highlighted Activities in 2018
  • Astrid CONGRE project (I'm coordinator), partners: I3S, LIRMM, ALSEAMAR, 2019-2021.
  • Selected as Outstanding Reviewer of the journal Automatica for the year 2017.
  • Journal paper "Feature-based Recursive Observer Design for Homography Estimation and its Application to Image Stabilization" (M.-D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony, P. Morin), Special Issue "Recent Advances on Data Fusion, Estimation in Navigation and Control", Asian Journal of Control, 2019.
  • Journal paper "Pipeline following by visual servoing for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles" (G. Allibert, M.-D. Hua, S. Krupinski, T. Hamel), Control Engineering Practice (CEP), 2019.
  • Submitted journal paper "Nonlinear observer design on SL(3) for homography estimation by exploiting point and line correspondences with application to image stabilization" (M.-D. Hua, J. Trumpf, T. Hamel, R. Mahony, P. Morin) to Automatica.
  • Co-chair CCTA invited Session "Observer Design for Navigation of Autonomous Vehicles" (organized with P. Batista).
  • CCTA paper "Riccati Observer Design for Pose, Linear Velocity and Gravity Direction Estimation using Landmark Position and IMU Measurements" (M.-D. Hua, G. Allibert).
  • CDC paper "Homography estimation of a moving planar scene from direct point correspondence" (S. de Marco, M.-D. Hua, R. Mahony, T. Hamel).
  •  
  • ECC paper "Homography Observer Design on Special Linear Group SL(3) with Application to Optical Flow Estimation" (N. Manerikar, M.-D. Hua, T. Hamel).
  • ICRA paper "Attitude, Linear Velocity and Depth Estimation of a Camera observing a planar target using continuous homography and inertial data" (M.-D. Hua, N. Manerikar, T. Hamel, C. Samson).
  • Submitted ECC'2019 paper "A nonlinear control approach for trajectory tracking of slender-body axisymmetric underactuated underwater vehicles" (L.-H. Nguyen, M.-D. Hua, T. Hamel).
 
SOME DEMO :  view here
  • Demo "homography-based stabilization of our AUV without linear velocity measurements"  Demo (credit to Lam Hung Nguyen)
  • Demo "real-time gyro-aided homography estimation"  Demo1, Demo2
  • Demo for paper "Explicit Complementary Observer Design on Special Linear Group SL(3) for Homography Estimation using Conic Correspondences" (CDC17) at http://goo.gl/8wFGb5
  • Demo for paper "Point and line feature-based observer design on SL(3) for Homography estimation and its application to image stabilization" at https://youtu.be/hlTkzjyENhg