New PhD Studentship in Department of Electronics

Evolution of immunity for robotic systems

Robots fail for all sorts of reasons causing potential errant behaviour and operation. This problem is potentially magnified when robots are operating in a swarm or collective. Research at York has been developing robotic systems, including swarms, that can automatically detect faulty robots by comparing an internal simulation of what is expected, to what is actually observed. This PhD project will build on our existing work, and extend to more complex robotic units, or robotic swarms. The project will investigate the feasibility of evolving an “artificial immune system” for a robot, or swarm of robots that is flexible, scalable and fault tolerant. This work directly aligns with the Departments strategy in the area of autonomous systems. You will work alongside Professor Jon Timmis and potentially one other member of staff in the autonomous systems area, depending on the robotic system of interest to the candidate.

The research will address the following issues: 1) the use of faster, embedded, than real-time simulation for fault detection; 2) use of bio-inspired systems, in particular immune-inspired systems, for detection and recovery strategies and 3) the use of evolutionary approaches to evolve the detection and recovery system in real-time.

If you are interested in applying for this studentship and would like to know more about the project, please contact Professor Jon Timmis (jon.timmis@york.ac.uk).

For more information please see this page