University of Birmingham, UK, are urgently looking for high calibre candidates to fill one  funded PhD position, to begin as soon as possible. Both PhD projects will form part of the major new EU H2020 project, RoMaNS (Robotic Manipulation for Nuclear Sort and Segregation). This project involves 5 institutions in UK, France and Germany, collaborating to develop cutting edge new robotics techniques to assist the future cleanup of legacy nuclear waste. Both PhDs will have opportunities for travel and interactions with top academic and industry partners across Europe, and also may contribute to a parallel UoB collaboration on robotic vision with KUKA UK.

PhD in  robotic manipulation – this project will look at one and/or two-arm/hand grasping of complex arbitrarily shaped objects. In particular, we wish to extend the cutting edge machine learning techniques that our group has recently developed for adaptive robotic grasping:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCHikOi_95E&feature=youtu.be

The PhD project has a degree of flexibility in direction, and might also contribute to ongoing work on human-robot interaction for semi-autonomous (tele-autonomy or variable-autonomy) human-supervised scene understanding and robotic manipulation experiments. For example, the robotic grasping might involve learning/teaching by human demonstration.

The  PhD will be jointly supervised by Dr. Rustam Stolkin (interdisciplinary roboticist) and Prof. Ales Leonardis (internationally leading Computer Vision expert), with additional supervisory input from UoB postdoctoral researchers in robotics and vision.

Funding: for EU citizens, we will pay all tuition fees plus a competitive living allowance of approx. £14,000 per year. For non-EU citizens, we can only cover the (much larger) oversees-rate tuition fees. However, it may be possible to supplement income with some teaching assistant type jobs during your study. We would also support Chinese applicants who wish to apply for CSC funding to support living costs, or similar schemes for residents of other countries.

Requirements: high scoring undergraduate degree, from a high calibre institution, in computer science, engineering or other relevant numerate discipline. Ideally also a subject-specific masters (robotics, AI, machine learning, vision training/experience would be useful). Candidates should also preferably be strong coders and will be expected to independently develop the high standard coding skills needed to carry out their project.

University of Birmingham has one of the leading and most interdisciplinary robotics research groups in the UK. Birmingham is the country’s second biggest city, and the most centrally located city in England, just 90 minutes from London by train and with its own international airport 20 mins from city centre.

All inquiries should be initially directed to Dr. Stolkin’s PA, Mrs Daniela Ionescu, atrustam.stolkin.pa<στο>gmail.com , including a full CV.

Please use “PhD application – vision” or “PhD application – manipulation” IN THE SUBJECT HEADING OF YOUR EMAIL.

We will continue interviewing until a high standard candidate is found.