Epsrc Centre Doctoral Tender

ScopeRobotics and Autonomous Systems RAS technologies are set to transform global industries. Agri-Food is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK contributing over 38bn GVA to the UK economy and employing 420000 people. It supports a food chain primary farming through to retail which generates a GVA of 108bn with 3.9m employees in a truly international industry with 20bn of exports in 2016. The global food chain cannot be taken for granted it is under pressure from global population growth climate change political pressures affecting migration e.g. Brexit population drift from rural to urban regions and the demographics of an aging global population in advanced economies. In addition jobs in the agri-food sector can be physically demanding conducted in adverse environments and relatively unrewarding. The opportunity for RAS in Agri-Food is compelling - however large-scale investment in basic underpinning research is required. We propose to create a CDT that focuses on advanced RAS technologies which will advance the state of the art by creating the largest global cohort of RAS specialists and leaders focused on the Agri-Food sector. This will include 50 PhD scholarships in projects co-designed with industry to give the UK global leadership in RAS across critical and essential sectors of the world economy expanding the UKs science and engineering base whilst driving industrial productivity and mitigating the environmental and societal impacts of the currently available solutions. In terms of wider impact the RAS challenges that need to be overcome in the agri-food sector will have further application across multiple sectors involving field robotics andor robotics in manufacturing. Studying robots for agriculture and food production together allows us to address fundamental challenges in RAS while delivering whole supply chain efficiencies and synergies across both sides of the farm gate. Core research themes include autonomous mobilitn challenging often GPS-denied and unstructured environments manipulation and soft robotics for handling delicate and unstructured food products sensing and image interpretation in challenging agricultural and manufacturing environments fleet management systems integrating methods for goal allocation joint motion planning coordination and control and co-bots for maintaining safe human-robot collaboration and interaction in farms and factories. All these themes will be applied across a range of applications in agri-food from soil preparation to selective harvesting and on-site grading through to food processing manufacturing and supply chain optimisation.