PhD Computing Science: Human-robot interaction for oilfield drilling applications

Many future industrial operations will be carried out by teams consisting of humans and robots. This project will investigate how such human-robot collaborative tasks can be carried out, concentrating on the communication aspects: how the robot communicates its intentions to the human, and how the human can query and interact with the robot’s plan.

The research will be driven by oilfield drilling applications, which involve control of complex equipment in a dynamic environment, with an increasing level of automation. Close coordination between the human crew and the automation system is often required, as is building trust between the human and the machine so that the crew understand why the machine acts the way it does and is confident it has taken all available information into account.

The student will be based in the School of Computing Science and will be part of the Glasgow Social Robotics initiative, which is a collaboration between Computing Science and Psychology.

The student should have excellent experience, enthusiasm and skills in the areas of natural language or multimodal interaction and/or automated planning and reasoning. Applicants must hold a good Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a relevant discipline. The project is an EPSRC iCASE award with Schlumberger Gould Research and it is expected that the student will spend some time working with the company. This will give you a great opportunity of working in an internationally excellent research group as well as a leading player in the oil and gas industry.