Connectionists: Senior Research Fellow in Simulation for Safety Assurance

[Tony Pipe]

Senior Research Fellow in Simulation for Safety Assurance

Full Description of post at: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BSK872/senior-research-fellow-in-simulation-for-safety-assurance

Location:              Bristol
Salary:                  £39,609 to £50,132
Hours:                  Full Time
Contract Type:      Permanent
Closes:                 26th June 2019
Job Ref:                R00143

About you: Working with Robotics and Autonomous Systems, you will develop new concepts and conduct research individually or by leading a part of the large team working in this area to achieve the laboratory objectives expressed above, including programming the simulation and associated Virtual Reality facilities, identifying sources of funding and contributing to the process of securing funds. To achieve this, you will extend, transform and apply knowledge acquired from scholarship to research and development activities in the context of externally and internally funded projects in the RAS domain.

You will make two main, safety related, contributions to a range of safety-critical RAS projects operating now and in the future at BRL. You will do this by making your own technical contributions, leading the activities of other more junior researchers, and by collaborating with the related local communities, such as the Bristol VR Laboratory and the South West Creative Network.

First, you will build on expertise developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Bristol during previous RAS projects, to develop and implement simulations of a RAS device operating in a selected set of environmental conditions, which may need to include hardware and/or humans 'in the loop'. Using such a simulation, you will design and implement scenarios that stretch the sensor and/or control systems of the chosen RAS device and, where it is important to do so, test human participants' reactions to selected scenarios. Clearly, using simulation, these situations can be much more easily varied in a known way so as to achieve more critical settings than those which can safely be tested in the real world.

Thus, you will develop and utilise simulation platforms, each tailored to an application domain, to discover and then investigate the most safety-critical situations, also known as the 'corner cases'. Often, these are the cases that need to be tested in the real-world. Thus, simulation will be used to guide the nature of expensive and risky real-world testing so as to minimise their number and to maximise their benefit in validating the RAS.

Second, having established the nature and detail of the real-world test environments and requirements of the real-world experiments themselves, you will carry out risk assessments that build towards safety cases for the identified real-world experiments to be conducted.

Thus, the safety and appropriateness of the sensor-perception pipeline and control system of the RAS device under test will be verified and validated. Where relevant, this will also help to evaluate its overall acceptability to any human interactants.

About the role: This is a permanent and full time vacancy.  In some Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) application domains, research and development is maturing rapidly. In such environments, the ability to bring about assurances for maintaining safety whilst providing useful service is becoming paramount. Critically, these assurances must be accepted by regulators as underpinning a legally governable process, without which, they will never get to market. Bristol Robotics Laboratory is engaged in a number of projects with exactly this primary aim, currently focused on the introduction of Connected Autonomous Vehicle technology, one of the most rapidly maturing domains. However, this is widely regarded as being just the beginning of a much wider future engagement in RAS technology development, i.e., it seems extremely likely that these issues will be shared by a very wide range of RAS device applications, ranging from robot surgery, through home assistance, to human-robot manufacturing teams.

About us: Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) is the most comprehensive academic centre for multi-disciplinary robotics research in the UK. It is a collaborative partnership between the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) and the University of Bristol, and home to a vibrant community of over 250 academics, researchers and industry practitioners. Together, they are world leaders in current thinking on service robotics, intelligent autonomous systems and bio-engineering. The state-of-the-art facilities covers an area of over 3,500 sq. metres (over 37,000 sq. feet) and BRL is an internationally recognised Centre of Excellence in Robotics.

The interviews are planned for last week in July or first week in August 2019.

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Tony Pipe
Professor of Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Deputy Director: Bristol Robotics Laboratory

Bristol Robotics Laboratory
T-Building
Frenchay Campus
Bristol UK BS16 1QY
Tel: +44 (0)117 3286330

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