PhD Studentship: Guardians of the Green: Enhancing Forest Defence with Autonomous Technologies

Supervisory Team: Dr. Danesh Tarapore and Prof. Jadu Dash

PhD Supervisor: Danesh Tarapore

Project Description:

Problem: Navigating and defending forests poses a significant challenge due to their large size and complex ecosystems, necessitating robust monitoring systems. Furthermore, preservation efforts are crucial to conserve biodiversity, mitigate climate change, and ensure sustainable resource management. Scalable distributed autonomous monitoring technologies, particularly swarms of ground robots, complimented with satellite imagery and sensor networks need to play a pivotal role, given their stealth and endurance capabilities, allowing for covert surveillance over extended periods. These advanced tools enhance our ability to protect habitats, detect illegal activities, find suitable route for movement and monitor ecosystem health across expansive forest landscapes more efficiently.

Project: We aim to develop a low-cost decentralized intelligent automation technology, using a swarm of robots to automate the monitoring of our forests, allowing for a novel data stream of measurements at high spatial and temporal resolutions. The developed swarm technology will address the problems of stealthily navigating challenging forest terrain, robustly coordinating the robots of the swarm across large distances in the forest and automating under canopy observations of forest parameters. This will enable us to provide stakeholders with a cohesive spatiotemporal shadow of our forest which can be used to simulate different scenarios.

This research area poses a number of challenges, particularly navigation in vegetated terrain, decentralized swarm coordination, data assimilation, and environment modelling. As such, the PhD project will be tailored to the skills and interests of the selected candidate.

For a more visual description of the project please see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVV3jIXXlCAeOcz_8V21RPe_ikifCsqAXT4V7B5Wzlw and https://daneshtarapore.com/forest-swarm.

Funding for this project is offered by the Centre for Doctoral Training in Complex Integrated Systems for Defence & Security (CISDnS), which will recruit motivated and inquisitive candidates across the themes of Digital, Physical and Biological systems to provide a diverse and interconnected cohort training environment. As well as carrying out research training in a world-leading research group, membership of CISDnS will provide the opportunity for you to be exposed and trained to handle the interdisciplinary challenges faced in the real-world via a Systems Thinking approach. You will learn about the wider challenges of research and innovation within the Defence & Security sector from both your peers and the numerous industry partners supporting the Centre.

Entry Requirements

A very good undergraduate degree (at least a UK 2:1 honours degree, or its international equivalent).

Closing Date: 30 June 2024.

Applications will be considered in the order that they are received, the position will be considered filled when a suitable candidate has been identified.

Funding: We offer a range of funding opportunities for both UK and international students, including Bursaries and Scholarships.  For more information please visit PhD Scholarships | Doctoral College | University of Southampton. Funding will be awarded on a rolling basis, so apply early for the best opportunity to be considered.

How To Apply

Apply online by clicking the 'Apply' button, above.Select programme type (Research), 2024/25, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, next page select “PhD Complex Integrated Systems for Defence and Security (Full time)”. In Section 2 of the application form you should insert the name of the supervisor: Danesh Tarapore

Applications should include:

• Curriculum Vitae
• Two reference letters
• Degree Transcripts/Certificates to date

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