Please note this opportunity is available to *UK/EU students only*

A PhD position is available at the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems Research (L-CAS) at the University of Lincoln UK. The position is fully funded for 3 years, including a student bursary, tuition fees, and participation in international conferences and meetings. Please note: this studentship is available to UK/EU candidates only; at present we are not able to offer any studentships to international candidates.

The successful candidate will be employed as part of a  European-funded collaborative project “ILIAD – Intra-Logistics with Integrated Automatic Deployment: safe and scalable fleets in shared spaces”, involving four academic institutes and five industrial partners across four European countries. The ILIAD project is driven by the application needs of fleets of robots that operate in intralogistics applications with a high demand on flexibility in environments shared with humans. In particular, the project aims to enable automatic deployment of a fleet of autonomous forklift trucks, which will continuously optimise its performance over time by learning from collected data. The University of Lincoln’s contributions to the project will include ensuring long-term operation of the ILIAD system, maintaining its environment representations over time while learning and predicting activity patterns of human co-workers; developing qualitative models for human-robot spatial interaction; systems architecture development and systems integration; and managing experimental work at test facilities, including the University’s National Centre for Food Manufacturing.

We are looking to recruit a PhD student with relevant experience and/or a strong interest in research areas including (but not limited to):

• Human-aware navigation
• Human activity monitoring and understanding;
• Human-robot interaction;
• Learning for autonomous systems from long-term experience;
• Systems integration, including ROS.

You should have a good Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Mathematics or Physics. You must have excellent mathematical and coding skills (C++/Python, ROS), and be available to start work on the project as soon as possible. The PhD studentship offers the opportunity to engage in international collaboration within an ambitious team, to work with state-of-the-art robotic hardware and software, and to benefit from excellent support to produce and disseminate original research contributions in the leading international conferences and journals. You must be able to work collaboratively as part of a team, including excellent written and spoken communication skills.

To apply for the position, please send a copy of your CV and transcript in an email with the title “PhD position in Long-Term Autonomy” to Dr Marc Hanheide (email: tduckett@lincoln.ac.uk), Dr Marc Hanheide (email: mhanheide@lincoln.ac.uk) and Dr Grzegorz Cielniak (email: gcielniak@lincoln.ac.uk). Applications will be assessed as they arrive and, if appropriate, we will contact applicants to discuss things further.