Dr. Yvan Petillot

Prof. Yvan Petillot is a Professor of Robotics and Computer Vision at the Heriot-Watt University, a leading member of the Oceans Systems Laboratory, Deputy Director of the Institute for Sensor Signals and Systems and Deputy Director of the joint research institute in Signal and Image Processing (ERP-SIP) with the University of Edinburgh. Yvan specializes in robotics and sensing and is an expert in autonomous systems, image analysis and control applied to the subsea domain. With over 15 years of experience in Robotics, Image Processing and Autonomous Systems in the maritime domain, he has made significant contributions to target detection and classification of multiple vehicle collaboration and autonomous inspection and manipulation. He is the deputy director of the UK Defense Research Centre in Signal Processing and has extensive experience in subsea localization and mapping. Yvan is also currently a Royal Society Industry Fellow in collaboration with SeeByte Ltd, a company he co-founded in 2001 and in which he was Chief Technical Officer until 2010. Yvan has a long history of successful collaborations with other leading researchers in Europe through a number of European Research Projects (ALIVE, Autotracker, Amason, 2005, FreeSubNet 2008, Trident, 2010, Eurathlon 2012), totalling over GBP 1.5M of research funding. He has also worked closely with MOD and DSTL on defence-related projects and secured a number of EPSRC projects in the robotics and signal processing areas.