Actuation, sensing and control for Soft Robots
Supervisors: Dr Min Pan
Soft robots are defined as systems that use materials with elastic moduli similar to soft biological materials (10-4 to 10-9 Pa) and are capable of autonomous behaviour. They can actively interact with the environment, achieve large deformations and their mode of operation relies on their inherent structural compliance. This project aims to design novel soft pneumatic muscles with inherent sensing and locomotion capabilities to enable intelligent control of future soft robots.
Experimental flight dynamics
Supervisors: Dr Jon L du Bois, Dr David Cleaver, Dr Pejman Iravani
The proliferation of unmanned aircraft and the development of new urban air mobility vehicles are leading to a wide variety of novel aircraft platforms designed to operate at myriad scales and in diverse environments. New vehicle concepts from tiltrotors to cyclocopters need development and evaluation. There are a number of vacancies covering the development of control and stability strategies for these vehicle platforms and development of the testing methods to go with them including ground test rigs and dynamic wind tunnel capabilities.
Flexure coupling mechanisms for high performance robotics and automation
Supervisors: Dr Nicola Bailey, Professor Patrick Keogh
Many automated processes depend upon fast, repeatable and precisely controlled motion of multibody mechanisms. Conventional multibody systems, used in robotics and automated machinery, contain joints that give complex and uncertain tribological effects, impacting negatively on performance. Eliminating the interaction forces within the joint by replacing the bearings with flexure couplings, which are compact deformable structures acting as pseudo-joints, provides more precise and predictable small-scale motion behaviour. Research is needed to optimise these to give precise three dimensional motion.
Perception and autonomy for unmanned aircraft
Supervisors: Dr Jonathan du Bois, Dr Pejman Iravani, Dr David Cleaver
Autonomous aircraft are becoming prevalent. Their integration into civilian airspace is presently limited by safety concerns over their sensing and decision-making processes. This research covers a variety of technologies including - sensors and data fusion - detect and avoid - route planning - system health monitoring and prognostics - mission optimisation
This work aims to create robust and reliable automation to facilitate the uptake of unmanned aircraft systems across a range of civilian sectors.