The University of Lincoln is seeking to appoint new Postdoctoral Research Fellows to join the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS). The Centre is internationally recognised for its research in robotics and autonomous systems, and currently comprises 11 staff and over 25 postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students. The successful candidates will be employed as part of a 4-year 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 two postdoctoral Research Fellows with relevant experience and/or a strong interest in research areas including (but not limited to):

• Long-term autonomy for mobile robots, including lifelong localisation and mapping;
• 3D perception and environment modelling;
• Human activity monitoring;
• Human-robot interaction;
• Learning for autonomous systems;
• Systems integration, including ROS.

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

The successful candidates 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 contribute to the wider activities of L-CAS. Evidence of authorship of research outputs of international standing is essential, as is the ability to work collaboratively as part of a team, including excellent written and spoken communication skills. Opportunities to mentor and co-supervise PhD students working in the project team will also be available to outstanding candidates.

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

To apply for one of the positions, please use the online application form at the following address: https://jobs.lincoln.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=COS369

Salary: From £32,004 per annum
Fixed term for 2 years initially with possible extension up to the project end date of 31st December 2020.
Closing Date: Sunday 15 January 2017
Interview Date: Tuesday 31 January 2017
Reference: COS369