[robocup-worldwide] Four international PhD studentships in Robotics at the University of Leeds

[Matteo Leonetti]

The School of Computing at the University of Leeds is offering four PhD 
studentships in robotics.

These scholarships covers tuition and maintenance fees for 
*international* and UK/EU students. Therefore, international applicants 
are welcome to apply.

Application deadline is 6 January 2017. However, we strongly encourage 
you to apply earlier than the deadline, since we will be evaluating 
applications as they arrive.

Each studentship is related to one of these four projects:
1. Active activity recognition on mobile robots
2. Robotic learning of physics to plan actions for tasks similar to the 
Amazon Picking Challenge
3. Robotic manipulation planning for collaborative human-robot manufacturing
4. Curriculum learning for reinforcement learning agents

The links for each project are listed at the end of this e-mail. Please 
follow the links for more information about each project and the 
associated supervisors. Please get in touch with the supervisor of the 
project you intend to apply to, before the deadline.

Even if you do not have any familiarity with the project topics, please 
do not hesitate to apply if you are interested in intelligent robotics 
and if you have a strong academic record.

You will be working in a lab equipped with new, state-of-the-art, 
robotic equipment (including a UR-5 arm on a Ridgeback omni-directional 
base, a bimanual Baxter robot, multiple Robotiq robot hands with 
force/torque sensing, OptiTrack motion tracking, and a Metralabs Scitos 
A5 mobile robot capable of autonomous navigation and activity tracking). 
University of Leeds recently made a $6.5M investment in robotics 
research and in a Robotics Center that our lab is affiliated with.

Students from Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical 
Engineering, Control Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mathematics 
departments, and other related fields are welcome to apply.

Leeds is a vibrant, multi-cultural, fun, and party-loving student city. 
The University of Leeds has recently been chosen as the University of 
the Year in the UK, by The Times and The Sunday Times. Leeds is one of 
the leading universities for research in the United Kingdom. The latest 
Research Excellence Framework exercise, conducted by the UK government, 
identified that 82.76% of Leeds’ research activity has a top quality 
rating of either “world leading” or “internationally excellent”.


Project links:

1. Active activity recognition on mobile robots:
https://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/research-opportunity/994/active-activity-recognition-from-a-mobile-robot- 


2. Robotic learning of physics to plan actions for tasks similar to the 
Amazon Picking Challenge:
https://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/research-opportunity/992/robotic-learning-of-physics-to-plan-actions-for-tasks-similar-to-the-amazon-picking-challenge- 


3. Robotic manipulation planning for collaborative human-robot 
manufacturing:
https://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/research-opportunity/991/robotic-manipulation-planning-for-collaborative-human-robot-manufacturing- 


4. Curriculum learning for reinforcement learning agents:
https://engineering.leeds.ac.uk/research-opportunity/988/curriculum-learning-for-reinforcement-learning-agents- 


-- 
Matteo Leonetti
Lecturer
University of Leeds