Edward Johns

Supervised by: Prof. Guang-Zhong Yang
 
What is he doing now: My PhD (2009-2013) was in computer vision for robotics, and I studied how a robot can determine which room, or which part of a city, it is currently in, using images captured from a camera. Before my PhD, I studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where I specialised in Electrical and Information Engineering. My final-year project involved designing, building, and programming a robot from scratch, and it was this multi-disciplinary nature of robotics which captivated me and led me to pursuing a career in this field. Before doing so, after graduating from Cambridge I put the robotics on hold and moved to London for a gap year, during which time I wrote music and performed across the UK's music scene, after which I then started my PhD at Imperial College.
 
Following my PhD, I took up a brief post-doctoral position at UCL, before returning to Imperial as a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab, with Prof. Andrew Davison. It was during this period that I gained a particular interest in robot manipulation, which is the study of how a robot can physically interact with objects in its environment, using its arms and hands. I was subsequently awarded a Research Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering, and more recently, I was appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Computing, where I am now Director of the Robot Learning Lab. My team and I continue to study robot manipulation, working at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning, and we focus on applications to domestic robots (e.g. tidying the home), manufacturing robots (e.g. assembling products in a factory), and warehouse robots (e.g. picking and placing from/into storage).