Mickey Li

Email: mickey.li@bristol.ac.uk

Supervisors: Arthur Richards and Andrew Calway

PhD Project Title: Failure and Robustness in Multi-Agent Coverage Path Planning for Inspection

Research Group: Aerial Robotics

Biography

I started on the Farscope CDT programme in late 2018 after graduating with a first from Imperial College London where I was on the MEng Mathematics and Computer Science course. During my time there, I developed core skills in general software engineering, theoretical computer science and applied mathematics and statistics. In my final years I chose to specialise in machine learning where I completed my dissertation with Dr Aldo Faisal of the Brain and Behaviour Lab developing real-time semantic SLAM for ego-centric video to be used for assistive robotics. I found the robotics aspect especially interesting and decided to continue my study in this centre in Bristol. 

As a result, my academic interests within robotics are in optimisation and control, SLAM and applied machine learning. Under the supervision of Prof Arthur Richards and Dr Tom Richardson, and in conjunction with the team at Toshiba R&D, my PhD will be researching and developing new techniques for multiple drone trajectory planning and coverage trajectory planning to be used in applications such as infrastructure inspection. The challenges within this field include how to derive collision free paths for multiple camera drones to inspect an entire, possibly unseen object with reliability, fault-tolerance and accuracy. Within robotics, I also have interests in swarm robotics, soft robots, musical robots and human robot interaction.

In my spare time, I also get involved with music - I am a classical pianist and jazz saxophonist - and as a result anything which brings science and music together! I also enjoy reading and exploring places!