Multi-robot coverage planning in dynamic environments

Applications are invited for a funded 3.5-year PhD studentship in multi-robot planning for coverage tasks.

Our project will develop hybrid planning methods for coverage-related applications where coverage is performed by robots changing the environment while they navigate. This type of coverage is inherent in many robotic application domains such as painting robots, autonomous underwater vehicles, robot window cleaners, and robots for inspection of complex structures, to name only a few.

We aim to investigate an application-agnostic solution to multi-robot coverage problem that is independent of coverage tasks, the shape of an environment, and the type and number of robots performing the tasks. Our research spans over several exciting fields of study including hybrid optimization, task and motion planning, and multi-robot coordination.

The contribution of this project will advance the state-of-the-art in hybrid problem-solving.

The successful candidate will join the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham. You will be supervised by Dr Masoumeh Mansouri
(https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mansourm)

Requirements:

Applicants should have a first-class or good upper second in Computer Science, Robotics or closely related field. Applicants also need to have a strong background in mathematics and high proficiency in programming, e.g., Python, C++ or Java. An MSc project in robot planning, scheduling, multi-agent decision making, optimization or a multi-robot systems related area would be beneficial but not essential.