Connectionists: PhD position in Resilient Robot Swarms

[Danesh Tarapore]

The School of Electronics and Computer Science
<https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/> (ECS) at the University of Southampton
<https://www.southampton.ac.uk/>, UK is offering a 3 years fully-funded
(fees and stipend) PhD studentship to UK/EU applicants for the development
of resilient robot swarms. Ranked in the top one percent of universities
globally, the University of Southampton has an international reputation for
its research, teaching and enterprise activities. ECS
<https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/research> is the leading department of its
kind in the UK, with an established track record for world-leading research
across computer science, electronics, and electrical engineering. The
student will be supervised by Dr Danesh Tarapore (d.s.tarapore at soton.ac.uk)
of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group
<https://www.aic.ecs.soton.ac.uk/> (AIC) based at ECS at the University of
Southampton.

Robot swarms are large-scale multirobot systems with decentralised control
which means that each robot acts solely based only on local perception and
on local coordination with neighbouring robots. The decentralised approach
to control confers a number of benefits in harsh environments. Robot swarms
have the potential to take on numerous real-world tasks. In particular,
tasks that require sensing or action over large areas or at a high
spatiotemporal resolution, such as environmental monitoring, are candidates
for application of future swarm robotics systems. However, robotic systems
must be dependable and display a high degree of tolerance to faults before
they can be deployed in real-world scenarios. This PhD project aims to
develop algorithms for low-cost robot swarms to rapidly recover -- in no
more than a few minutes -- from faults and damages sustained during
operation. The project will take insights from various research disciplines
including evolutionary computation, data-efficient machine learning, and
swarm robotics.

Prospective candidates should have a first class degree and/or master's
degree in computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence,
robotics, or a closely related discipline.

Application procedure:

Formal applications can be completed online:
https://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/phd/how-to-apply. You should select “PhD
Computer Science” as your research programme (Faculty of Physical Sciences
and Engineering). Please note Dr Danesh Tarapore as supervisor and Agents,
Interaction and Complexity as research group in your online application.


Informal inquiries can be made to Dr Danesh Tarapore (
d.s.tarapore at soton.ac.uk) with a copy of your curriculum vitae and cover
letter indicating your interest in the project and why you wish to
undertake it.

References:

A. Cully, J. Clune, D. Tarapore and J.-B. Mouret. "Robots that can adapt
like animals." Nature 521.7553 (2015): 503-507.

D. Tarapore, A. Lyhne Christensen and J. Timmis. "Generic, scalable and
decentralized fault detection for robot swarms." PloS one 12.8 (2017):
e0182058.


Danesh Tararpore

Assistant Professor

School of Electronics and Computer Science

University of Southampton

Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

URL: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/dst1m17
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