Research Associate in Swarm Robotics

Are you an ambitious researcher in machine learning, swarm robotics, multi-robot systems, distributed AI or autonomous systems looking to lead internationally significant work? We have an exciting opportunity for an experienced researcher to lead the development of decentralised swarm control algorithms for underground pipe operations.

You will join an international research programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), developing machine intelligence for teams of autonomous robots working in buried water infrastructure. These environments are difficult for humans to access and impose severe constraints on communication, sensing, power and computation. Your work will help advance new robotic approaches for exploration, anomaly detection, information sharing, collective decision-making, reporting and robot dispatch in complex underground pipe networks. You will lead the design and evaluation of bio-inspired, optimisation-based and machine-learning-enabled methods for robot swarms operating under these constraints. These includes methods for global maps creation by a swarm of robots, swarm localisation and navigation in buried networks.

You will validate these methods through simulation, Bayesian methods, Gaussian Process regression algorithms with uncertainty quantification of the impact of environmental conditions and other factors on the developed solutions, perform physical robot experiments, and help translate new ideas into robust algorithms and convincing experimental demonstrations. You will also contribute to the strategic direction of this research area, support publications and project coordination, and help develop future funding applications and collaboration opportunities.

You will work in a collaborative research environment at the University of Sheffield, with strong links across the Centre for Machine Intelligence and Sheffield Robotics, and with international partners including TU Darmstadt, MIT and Boston University. The project builds on the University of Sheffield’s extensive research experience in robotics for buried infrastructure and offers the opportunity to contribute to research with clear scientific, industrial and societal impact.

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