We are looking for high caliber candidate to fill funded PhD position, to begin as soon as possible. This PhD project will form part of the major projects including an EU H2020 project (Robotic Manipulation), Uk-Korea mobile manipulation project and national UK EPSRC project in collaboration with other institutions across the UK, Europe and other continents, including CEA and CNRS from France, TUDa from Germany, and KAERI from Korea. We actively collaborate to develop cutting edge new robotics techniques for autonomous/semi-autonomous and teleportated robotic manipulation and monitoring/inspection. We are currently looking for highly motivated PhD students for different topics:

(T0) Forceful interaction with the environment: in this project, we are interested in studying how a mobile robot can use cutting tools to cut some objects in the scene. This includes cutting path generation, navigation of the mobile vehicle and controlling of the arm during cutting. The ideal candidate may have background and knowledge in control engineering, mechanical engineering, robotics or any other related disciplines. Familiarity with computer vision is a plus for the ideal candidate.

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. All PhDs will be working with Dr. Stolkin and Dr. Ghalazman.



General requirements: the candidate is expected to be curious, creative, and passionate about research and interested in learning and developing ideasto join ourteam. The future PhD student is also supposed to work in collaboration with colleagues within the institute as well as with external collaborators. The candidate expects to have:

(i) high scoring master degree in robotics, AI, machine learning, computer science, electrical engineering or other relevant disciplines;

(ii) programming skills: C++ or Python;

The ideal candidate is expected to have conducted research in at least one of the following topics:

(i) robotics (or ideally robotic grasping)

(ii) haptic;

(iii) computer vision;

(iv) artificial intelligence/machine learning;

(v) control engineering. Moreover, the following are pluses for the ideal candidates: Robot Operating System (ROS), OpenCV, Point cloud library (PCL) Or any related library related to robotics, simulation, and computer vision.

What we offer:

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.




The selected applicant has the chance to be engaged in multidisciplinary projects collaborating with different experts across high ranked academic institutes. In addition, the selected applicant will be provided with the state-of-the-art equipment including different types of robots and sensors. The 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.



Extreme Robotics Lab (ERL) is the recently established laboratory aiming at finding solutions for autonomous/semi-autonomous robotic grasping/manipulation. ERL is developing centre having 2 Kuka iiwa, 1 Schunk LWA-4D and a Taurob as well as many RGB-D sensors. For more information please visit ERL webpage.


All inquiries should be directed to Dr. Ghalamzan via erl.uobham@gmail.com. Please include in your email:

a full CV;

statement of purpose (SOP);

recommendation letters or two references who can be contacted in this regard;

transcripts.

Please use “ERL PhD application ERL_17_T0” in the subject heading of your email. We will continue interviewing until a high standard candidate is found.