project

Fully-funded PhD scholarship in Human-Robot Collaboration

Marc Hanheide Jobs, project
We have tentatively secured funding for an exciting PhD position (for UK/EU students only I’m afraid) in the area of Robotics. The successful candidate will be pursuing a PhD within the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS) under the supervision of Dr Marc Hanheide and Prof Tom Duckett. The project is about long-term adaptation in human-robot collaboration for manufacturing applications.
The studentship covers all fees, plus a stipend of £15000 per year for a duration of 3.5 years. The position is part of a recent strategic investment by the University of Lincoln, and only projects that recruit strong candidates will actually be funded. So, we need excellent candidates, ideally with a strong background in AI, Robotics, Mathematics, Engineering, or Machine Learning, to apply for this position to turn this funding opportunity into a real project.
If you are excited about human-robot collaboration and its potential to change the way we manufacture, apply by sending a covering letter outlining your interest and proposed approach (up to 1 page A4) with an accompanying CV tomhanheide@lincoln.ac.uk by close of day on 18th April 2014.
Further details to be found here.

Presentations of our new FP7 project “STRANDS” at ERF and ICRA

Marc Hanheide project, STRANDS

Tom Duckett and Marc Hanheide of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems will be presenting the general aims and objectives of the new FP7 project “STRANDS: Spatio-Temporal Representations and Activities For Cognitive Control in Long-Term Scenarios” – and L-CAS’ role in its research work plan in particular – at ICRA 2013 and ERF 13, respectively. The project’s aim is …

“… to enable a robot to achieve robust and intelligent behaviour in human environments through adaptation to, and the exploitation of, long-term experience.”

Our approach is based on understanding 3D space and how it changes over time, from milliseconds to months. Within L-CAS two post-doctoral research fellows and one PhD student will work towards this aim in the coming four years starting in April.

Students accomplished robot project “Poomba”

Marc Hanheide project

Our students Mike, Jonathan, and Pete have successfully accomplished their summer project (read their progress blog), ending with a very successful final demonstration. First, our “Poomba” robot (the Raspberry Pi Roomba) set out to autonomously explore the environment…
[youtube YpxPYJ65MT8]

… and then we used the acquired data to map it (using ROS gmapping).

[youtube -TVoDgOvWls]

So, we have a proper mobile robot setup with a iRobot Create (Roomba), ROS setup, the Raspberry Pi as controller, a wireless network, and a host PC (running all the computation-heavy stuff like the mapping), all ready to go for future projects.

Thanks to Mike, Jonathan, and Pete for their engagement and the fantastic work they have delivered.