The University of Lincoln is seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to join the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS). The successful candidate will be employed as part of the Innovate UK funded ‘First Fleet’ project, which will develop a fully integrated robotic fleet, which has the potential to transform food production. The project will be led by Saga Robotics Ltd, who are driving the largest global soft fruit robotics projects in collaboration with the University of Lincoln and Berry Gardens, the UK’s largest soft fruit industry co-operative. The successful applicant will join a development project team of 25 full-time researchers and engineers, with collaboration partners in Lincoln, Oxford, Manchester and in Norway, and have access to excellent research facilities and funding, including the world’s first fully robotic fruit farm at Lincoln.

This project will extend our existing modular fleet management system to include multiple robotic applications necessary to drive a step change in productivity for the fruit sector, including UV-C pathogen treatment, multi-spectral imaging to detect crop disease, AI for fruit forecasting and precision spraying. The multi-modal system will be integrated into the existing agricultural mobile robot Thorvald developed by Saga Robotics and University of Lincoln.

We are looking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with relevant experience and/or a keen interest in a number of research areas, including (not exclusively):

• robot perception and manipulation;
• motion planning;
• machine vision for agricultural applications;
• learning for autonomous systems;
• software engineering in robotics.

Applicants should have or expect to soon obtain, a PhD (or equivalent) in a relevant area. You must have excellent mathematical and coding skills (C++/Python, ROS, PCL, OpenCV). The Research Fellowship 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.

This post will be fixed term until 30th January 2022 with excellent opportunities for ongoing career development and progression. The successful candidate will contribute to the University’s ambition to achieve international recognition as a research-intensive institution and will be expected to design, conduct and manage original research in the above subject areas as well as to contribute.

Informal enquiries about the post can be made to Prof. Marc Hanheide (mhanheide@lincoln.ac.uk) or Dr Grzegorz Cielniak (gcielniak@lincoln.ac.uk).

As an institutional Athena SWAN Bronze Award holder, we are committed to advancing gender equality in STEM, therefore female applicants are strongly encouraged to apply.

Apply here