Benchmarking Robotic Tactile Sensors PhD
The Manipulation and Touch Lab at Imperial College London has funding to support a home PhD student on the topic of benchmarking contemporary tactile sensors.
Increasing interest in robotic manipulation has led to recent an explosion in the variety of (commercial and experimental) tactile sensing platforms, which vary in transduction techniques, fabrication methods and processing approaches. While all sensors have their pros and cons, there is currently no clear documentation to allow these sensors to be directly compared, particularly when diverse use cases are considered.
Comparative benchmarking has become an important topic in robotic manipulation within the last decade or so, leading to such efforts as the YCB object set, COMPARE ecosystem and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) task boards. Clearly, a similar effort would be beneficial for tactile sensing, though the scope and details of such benchmarks are currently unclear.
The developments of relevant and rigorous sensor tests will be the focus of this PhD, which will be actualised via high-precision robotic test equipment and access to multiple tactile sensors.
We anticipate this research to generate protocols and datasets that will be shared with the international robotics research community, as we have done with our past research outputs.
To make initial enquiries about the position, please send an email to Dr Ad Spiers with the subject line ‘MTL Tactile PhD’.
Applicants are expected to hold either a Bachelor’s (2:1 or higher) and Master’s (Merit or higher) or Integrated Master’s (Merit or higher) in relevant subjects.
Applications must be made via the departmental portal (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/electrical-engineering/study/phd/). Applications received via email will be discarded.
PhD Students
The Manipulation and Touch Lab (MTL) of Imperial College London (www.imperial.ac.uk/manipulation-touch) is searching for new PhD students to work on one of the following topics :
- Robotic in hand manipulation with novel mechanisms
- Machine learning for robotic tactile sensing
- Novel haptic interfaces
Due to departmental scholarship constraints we are ONLY able to consider students with first class degrees.
Applications may be made via the Imperial portal. Please include a research statement rather than a personal statement: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/electrical-engineering/study/phd/
It is recommend to send Ad an email first to discuss which topic you are interested pursuing. His email is a.spiers[at]imperial.ac.uk. Please set the subject to 'MTL PhD'.