4 Year Fully-funded PhD Studentships
Application Deadline: Applications for this studentship are now closed
Academic Interviews: w/c 5th June 2023
Partner Interviews: w/c 12th June 2023
Start date: Monday, 25th September 2023
Industry Partner: Various
We have two interdisciplinary PhD studentships available in the area of Human-Robot Interaction. The students will work on commercial mobile robots, including but not limited to the Boston Dynamics Spot platform. In both projects, robot deployment will require high levels of autonomy in semi-controlled environments, such as factory floors, extreme environments or dense human spaces, hence the ability to detect and recover from errors during navigation will be essential to run for extended periods of time. The students will develop novel incremental learning methodologies to develop context-based policies, not only for navigation, but error recovery in long term automation. Human-in-the-loop and teleoperated control methods will be used as the backbone strategy to ensure increasing levels of autonomy during long term operation.
The studentships will focus on a combination of novel sensor solutions to inspect complex environments, human-aware motion planning methods to navigate in dense human spaces and interaction abilities to receive human help when necessary to handle potentially problematic situations and optimise day-to-day operations in real use case scenarios provided by industrial partners.
Please note that the student will use commercial robots and develop software to implement (semi-) autonomous robotic behaviours. Projects will require working with real robots interacting with real humans in challenging environments. Hence the student must have good experience with programming (machine learning and robotics knowledge is desirable) and a strong interest in conducting user studies.
The student will be given full access to Cobot Maker Space facilities (https://cobotmakerspace.org/ ) to develop the work. In addition, the student will be expected to have research visits with the associated company during the PhD project.
For more information please contact ayse.kucukyilmaz@nottingham.ac.uk.
For more information about the application process, including eligibility and selection criteria and the documentation you need to provide please see How to Apply section. Please explain why your are interested in the Human-Robot Interaction theme and what you will bring to the project.
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The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Horizon: Creating our Lives in Data is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant reference EP/S023305/1.
