UDRC Deputy Director

Work Package 3 (E_WP3) Leader

Yvan Petillot is a Professor at Heriot-Watt University who specialises in robotics and sensing and is an expert in autonomous systems, image analysis and control applied to the subsea domain. He has made major contributions in sonar image processing and target detection and recognition.  He manages a portfolio of £1M grants covering all aspects of underwater signal processing from MIMO and bio-inspired sonar systems to seabed classification and automatic target detection in clutter.

Prof. Petillot has a long history of collaborative research within the EU having participated in 7 EU projects, 2 of which as PI. He has been heavily involved in signal processing for defence with funding from EPSRC through the UDRC programme, ONR through NICOP grants and MOD/DSTL, as part of the Osprey consortium for underwater, and the MOD competition of ideas program. He is a non- executive director of SeeByte Ltd, a company he cofounded in 2001 to commercialize subsea smart technologies in the defence and offshore sectors. He is also a Royal Society Industry Fellow since 2013 developing new technologies for the defence and offshore market in SeeByte Ltd.

Email: Y.R.Petillot@hw.ac.uk