Heriot-Watt University

AnKobot is sponsoring an exciting PhD project in the field of mobile autonomy using visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), semantic scene understanding and computer vision.

**Note: Project availability subject to collaboration agreement being signed**

SeeByte is sponsoring a PhD in the area of Human-Machine Interaction for safe, innovative and dynamic use of marine autonomous systems. These systems have varying autonomy and communication ability ranging from tethered remote controlled Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV)s that have low autonomy, to completely autonomous systems that can go deep underwater but with limited comms, as well as autonomous surface and air vehicles with continuous communications.

Deep Neural Network (DNN) technologies coupled with GPU type hardware provide practical methods for learning complex functions from vast datasets.  However, their architectures are often developed using trial and error approaches and the resulting systems normally provide ‘black box’ solutions containing many millions of learnt but abstract parameters. They are therefore extremely difficult to interpret and understand, and their accuracy and certainty of prediction, or classification, are normally not known.

**Note: Project availability subject to collaboration agreement being signed**

Codeplay https://www.codeplay.com/ is a company in Edinburgh with industry expertise with compiler construction and processor architectures. They are a leading partner in the standardisation of SYCL, a programming abstraction for heterogeneous hardware. Codeplay have SYCL implementations for CPUs and GPUs.

The Codeplay CEO, Andrew Richards, founded the company in 2002. He chairs the working group for the SYCL standard within the Khronos Group.

Subsea inspection of structures is now commercial and the next frontier in subsea robotics is the safe physical interactions with underwater structures. This requires the development of new control algorithms with force compliance which can take into account external disturbances. There is also a need to work across a variety of control models, from full teleoperation across high bandwidth data to shared autonomy (our goal) across low and intermittent connection to enable shore-based control of remote platforms.

The Internet-of-Robotic-Things (IoRT) brings together autonomous robotic systems with the Internet of Things (IoT) vision of sensors and smart objects pervasively embedded in everyday environments [1-4]. This merge can enable novel applications in almost every sector where cooperation between robots and IoT technology can be imagined. Early signs of this convergence are in network robot systems [5], robot ecologies [6], or in approaches such as cloud robotics [7].