Greg Baker

Email: gregory.baker@brl.ac.uk

Supervisors: Manuel Giuliani and Paul Bremner

PhD Project Title: An intuitive and immersive user interface for the teleoperation of mobile manipulators in nuclear decommissioning tasks

Research Group: Nuclear Robotics

Biography

Background:

In nuclear environments, sending robots in to perform tasks is often preferable to sending in human operators, as it reduces the exposure of humans to potentially harmful radiation. Manual, teleoperative control is almost exclusively used in this industry, as full autonomy is either technologically infeasible, or undesirable from a safety perspective. My research aims to look into novel ways to control robots that uses partial or supervised autonomy, to help bridge the gap between fully manual and fully autonomous control, allowing tasks to be done more expediently and more safely.

I aim to utilise immersive interfaces, such as a head-mounted display (HMD), to remotely monitor or control the robot. Immersive interfaces - which encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) - provide the opportunity for more intuitive and effective methods of control and feedback than traditional user interfaces (UIs). I aim to explore the effects of these novel control and feedback mechanisms on the ability of the operator to perform tasks in the remote environment, using a series of participant studies.

About Me:

I graduated from Imperial College London with a First Class degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 2015. After graduating, I worked for a small engineering firm helping to design rotary (Wankel) engines for UAVs, as well as designing and building a custom two-stroke engine for a motorised surfboard. In 2016, I joined the Rolls-Royce graduate development programme, in the nuclear division. Over the next year, I worked on a range of different projects, including design work for a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) proposal, as well as on an R&D project looking into robotics in the nuclear power plants of the future. It was during this placement that I realised the extent of my interest in robotics, prompting me to return to academia to be fully immersed in the field that I love.