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People of the York Robotics Laboratory (YRL)

Professor Jon Timmis is the director of the York Robotics Laboratory.  Dr James Hilder is the full-time laboratory technician.  Several other academics, research staff and research students, and other technical support staff from multiple departments across the University are associated with the lab.

 

Staff

 NameArea of ResearchRole
  Dr Rob Alexander Safety analysis and testing of autonomous robots and multi-agent systems.  Simulation methods for hazard analysis.  Empirical evaluation of safety engineering methods and techniques.

Lecturer

Computer Science

  Mr Michael Angus Robotics technician with specific focus on the ARE project.

Technician


Electronic Engineering

  Prof Alistair Boxall Emerging and future ecological and health risks posed by chemical contaminants in the natural environment.

Professor

Environment

  Dr Adrian Bors Computer vision, computational intelligence, image processing, pattern recognition, neural networks, nonlinear digital signal processing and digital watermarking.

Lecturer

Computer Science

  Edgar Buchanan Research associated on the ARE project

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

Mr Tim Clarke Avionics, Bio-Inspired Computing, Cognitive Networking, Control Engineering, Evolutionary Algorithms, Fault-Tolerant Design, Flight Control, Multi-Agent Systems and Radar

Senior Lecturer

Electronic Engineering

Prof Peter Cowling Building computer systems to help make decisions in games and resource optimisation, using tools from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operational Research (OR).

Professor

Computer Science and Management

Prof Gusz Eiben Evolutionary computing: multi-parent recombintion, evolutionary contraint handling, evolutionary art, artificial life and evolutionary robotics.  Self-reproducing robotic systems.

Visiting Professor

Electronic Engineering

(Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)

 

Dr Daniel Franks Animal behavior, with focus on analysing animal social networks, and developing methods & models for analysing animal societies.

Lecturer

Biology and Computer Science

Michael Freeman Dr Michael Freeman Multi-soft-core processor based systems, with hardware OS support in FPGA devices, applied to mobile robotic systems. Background interest in hardware architectures for high speed text processing and minimal CISC processor design.

Teaching Fellow

Computer Science

 ‌ Dr Simon O'Keefe Neural networks, in particular the theory and application of binary Correlation Matrix Memory neural networks.  Non-standard computation, in particular bio-inspired and chem-inspired computing.

Lecturer

Computer Science

Dr James Hilder Robotic hardware electronics design, currently focussed on swarm robotics and sensor design.  Embedded computing.  Bio-inspired algorithms, genetic algorithms and programming.  Computer aided design and 2D\3D fabrication techniques.  Machine vision, tracking and photography.

Robotics Laboratory Technician

Computer Science and Electronic Engineering

Dr Daniel Kudenko Machine learning (specifically reinforcement learning), multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence for games, interacive drama, user modeling and data mining. 

Lecturer

Computer Science

Photo of Wei Li Dr Wei Li Autonomous robots and computational intelligence, specifically in self-organizing robotic systems and co/evolutionary machine learning.

Research Associate


Electronic Engineering

Alan Millard Dr Alan Millard

Working on the SPANNER project - Self-repairing spiking neural networks for fault-tolerant robot control

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

 ‌Photo of Shuhei Dr Shuhei Miyashita

Shuhei Miyashita is a robotics researcher working on self-assembly and self-reconfigurable robots at multiple scales. His work pursuits formal understanding of synthesizing artificial compounds at the human scale, seeking a bio-inspired novel manufacturing method of robots.


Originally from Tsukuba Science City in Japan, Miyashita received his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and later continued his research as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. He is currently the director of Microrobotics Group at the University of York in the UK.

Lecturer in Intelligent Robotics

Director of the Microrobotics Group


Electronic Engineering

 

Becky Naylor Becky Naylor

Researching robotic swarm simulation on the CoCoRo Project (underwater swarm robotics).

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

 Mayank Paymar Mayank Paymar

Collective robotic systems for environmental monitoring.

Marie Curie Research Fellow


Electronic Engineering

  Dr Nick Pears Computer vision, pattern recognition, in particular related to 3D imaging and 3D shape analysis. Specific projects include 3D face landmarking; 3D face modelling for medical applications; 3D shape matching for web retrieval; 2D/3D face recognition, visual tracking and recognition of human activity; real-time embedded architectures for vision.

Senior Lecturer

Computer Science

Dr Fiona Polack Application and development of computer simulation to support scientific research (applications such as cancer neogenesis, cell dynamics, modelling novel computational substrates); model driven engineering (metamodelling, and domain specific languages); simulation of complex systems; emergent systems; validation arguments. 

Senior Lecturer

Computer Science

Dr Andrew Pomfret Control systems, biologically-inspired fault-tolerant systems, metamorphic systems, multi-objective optimisation.

Lecturer

Electronic Engineering

Prof Susan Stepney Non-standard computation: bio-inspired algorithms, complex adaptive systems, emergent properties, nanite assemblers.

Professor

Computer Science

Dr Danesh Tarapore

Experience in design of fault-tolerant collective robotics systems, with research work in areas of evolutionary robotics, computational immunology, social biology, and use of robots as physical models in experimental biology.

Marie Curie Research Associate


Electronic Engineering

Prof Jon Timmis

Development of computational models of immune function (computational immunology), and fault-tolerance achieved via bio-inspired engineering with a focus on the immune system (immuno-engineering). Swarm robotic systems as a platform for testing our ideas realting to fault tolerence and anomaly detection. Modelling and simulation of complex systems.

Robotics Laboratory Director

Professor of Intelligent and Adaptive Systems

Electronic Engineering

Martin Trefzer Dr Martin Trefzer

Using bio-inspired techniques to create scalable, fault-tolerant, adaptive and autonomous digital systems; dynamic and multi-reconfigurable architectures to tackle nano-scaled design.

Lecturer

Electronic Engineering

Prof Andy Tyrrell Artificial Immune Systems, Bio-Inspired Computing, Evolutionary Algorithms, Evolutionary Computing, Fault-Tolerant Design, Microprocessor Design, Reconfigurable Systems

Head of Intelligent Systems Group

Electronic Engineering

Prof Alan Winfield Mobile robotics: intelligent control, stable adaptive neural control and behaviour based control.  Swarm robotics: algorithms, analysis, modelling and specification for potential high integrity applications.

Visiting Professor

Electronic Engineering

(Bristol Robotics Lab)

 

Previous Staff

Dr Ed Clark 2014 - Teaching fellow for the MSc Autonomous Robotics Engineering Course.

Collective robotics, emergent behaviour, artificial chemistries.

Teaching Fellow

Electronic Engineering

 Mark Read Dr Mark Read 2013 - Research associate on the CoCoRo Project.  Now a Research Fellow and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney.

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

Dr Alex Turner 2013 - Researched software systems on the CoCoRo Project (underwater swarm robotics.)  Now lecturing at Hull University.

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

Research Students

Current Students

Post-Graduate Researchers

NameArea of ResearchDepartment
Sophie Alexander

Safe and Reliable Swarm Robotic Systems

Computer Science
Edgar Buchanan Fault Tolerant Heterogeneous Swarms
Electronic Engineering
Naomi Gildert   Electronic Engineering
James O'Keefe

Evolvable Immune Systems for Swarm Robotics

Electronic Engineering
Oyinlola Oladiran

Evolvable Immune Systems for Swarm Robotics

Electronic Engineering
Matthew Prinold

Multi-Robots for Tracking Objects of Interest

Computer Science
Richard Redpath

Autonomous Swarm Exploration of Unknown Terrains

Electronic Engineering
Hao Sun

Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping using Consumer Grade 3D Cameras

Computer Science
Hao Wei

Safe and Reliable Swarm Robotic Systems

Computer Science
Guangsha Xu

Collective Task Allocation in Swarm Robotics

Electronic Engineering
Yuyuan Zhang

Metamorphic Architectures for Flying Robots

Electronic Engineering

 

 MSc Intelligent Robotics

Name
 

 


Under-Graduate
 

NameArea of ResearchDepartment
Alex Butcher Augmented reality debugging systems for robot swarms Electronic Engineering
Antonio Figueirido Voice-control of robot swarms using IBM Watson Electronic Engineering
Nathaneal Young Android application for PsiSwarm robot in education Electronic Engineering

 

 

Alumni

PhD Students
Dr Ran Bi Computer Science
Dr Rita Ismail Computer Science
Dr Anna Ladi Electronics
Dr Hui Keng Lau Computer Science
Dr Tiong Hoo Lim Computer Science
Dr Yang Liu Electronics
Dr Lachlan Murray Electronics
Dr Jenny Owen Computer Science
Dr Nick Owens Electronics
Dr Omer Qadir Electronics
Dr James Stovold Computer Science
MSc Students
Edgar Buchanen Berumen  2014
Huseyin Erdem  2014
Homero Silva Elizondo 2015
Robert Evans 2015
Cristian Valentin Fleseriu 2017

Yujia Gao ("Jessica")

2017
Matthew Hosier 2017

Samuel Jakobsen

2017
Chengqing Liu 2015
Mohammadshahid Memon 2014 
Krishnan Nambiar 2014 

Leonard Newbrook

2017
Mayank Paymar  2014

Alix Partridge

2017  
Jose Maria Rivas 2017
Muhammad Rizzuwan Bin Abdul Wahid  2014
Zihui Wang 2017
Shengsong Yang 2015
Dingdian Zhang 2017
 

Undergraduate Students
Alexander Horsfield Electronics Design of an Android-based teaching app. for PsiSwarm Robots
Georgi Hristov Electronics Pattern formation in E-Puck Robots
Patrick Hutton Computer Science Search, localisation and recruitment with drone Robots
Ali Jewers Electronics Augmented reality debugging systems for robot swarms
Artjoms Rizihs Computer Science Swarming algorithms with Pi Swarm Robots