Our Vision
FARSCOPE’s vision is ubiquity – robots everywhere – and will require a step-change in the richness with which robots interact with their surrounding. Ubiquity promotes consideration of contextual impact beyond the machine, including social and societal considerations that are common to robotics deployments in any scenario; extreme and challenging environments, next-generation manufacturing, autonomous transport and health and social care.
We need future robots that are:
Smart - matching robust hardware with intelligent software to behave well in unstructured settings
Safe - trusted on a technical and societal level to operate unsegregated in the world
Scalable - designed and programmed for large scale deployments and evolution of roles
Social - able to interact naturally with humans
The FARSCOPE CDT will adopt an inclusive view of robotics and autonomous systems. Any technical research that supports intelligent machines physically interacting with the world is in scope. Our PhD programme is designed to get students' thinking beyond a robot’s technology and about its environment.This demands multidisciplinary thinking, as enabling technologies of computer science and engineering interface with questions of natural and life sciences, policy, ethics, law and more. For example, FARSCOPE’s mechanical engineers and psychologists will study how a robot’s form and behaviour influence human response; control analysts and chemists will study the use of new smart materials for actuation; mathematicians and transport experts will study how to optimize autonomous mobility infrastructure. Many robotics applications, such as nuclear decommissioning, also span disciplines, interfacing with healthcare and nuclear physics, to name two extremes.
Our aim is to give FARSCOPE students both the multidisciplinary tools and contextual knowledge to tackle today’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) research challenges and in doing so train the next-generation of RAS innovators.