Lincoln Agri-Robotics PhD Studentships

Do you want to design and build intelligent robots that will help society address problems around feeding the world's growing population and ensuring a safe environment for the future?

Applications are invited for fully-funded three-year PhD studentships within Lincoln Agri-Robotics (LAR), the world's first global centre of excellence in agricultural robotics, funded by UKRI's Research England. This exciting centre bridges and expands the strong collaborations that exist between two leading research groups at the University of Lincoln: the Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (LIAT) and the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS). Students will work on projects that strive to make a real difference in the world, by investigating challenges that face the global agri-food industry: climate change, population growth, political pressures affecting migration and ageing populations.

Students will focus their research within one of three grand challenges prioritised by LAR, while developing their own skills and knowledge as roboticists. These challenges are: (1) selective harvesting, e.g. picking a strawberry using novel soft or non-contact grippers; (2) crop care, e.g. identifying and removing weeds that attack individual plants while scaling to cover whole farms; and (3) phenotyping robotics, e.g. gathering data on plant traits, weeds, pests and disease using multi-scale approaches with novel and traditional sensor devices. The key technologies targeted for PhD research contributions lie in one (or more) of the five specialties essential to LAR (mobile autonomy, manipulation & soft robotics, sensing & perception, fleet management, and human-robot collaboration). Students will gain experience developing research strategies, implementing approaches on physical robots, testing solutions in live fields, and/or evaluating systems with end users.

Students can also benefit from:

• The opportunity to develop their career, working alongside and in collaboration with academic and industry specialists of the future.
• Internships, project work and engagement opportunities with world-leading companies who are interested in both research collaboration and future postdoctoral graduates.
• LAR PhD students will have the opportunity to study alongside students in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Agri-Food Robotics (AgriFoRwArdS), led by the University of Lincoln in collaboration with universities of Cambridge and East Anglia.

Applications

If you are a dynamic, focussed graduate with a first or upper second-class honours degree, a Master’s degree or equivalent professional experience, then come and be part of the food production revolution.

PhD Studentships Application Form

The current round of applications closes on 26 October 2020. Early application is advised.

Apply by sending the following documents to the LAR team at lar@lincoln.ac.uk

• Completed Application Form
• Current CV
• Transcript of your first degree
• Transcript(s) of any previous degrees

For further enquiries, please contact the LAR team at lar@lincoln.ac.uk