People of the York Robotics Laboratory (YRL)

Professor Jon Timmis is the director of the York Robotics Laboratory. Dr James Hilder is the full-time laboratory technician. Several other academics, research staff and research students, and other technical support staff from multiple departments across the University are associated with the lab.

Staff
Research Students

Staff

	Name	Area of Research	Role
	Dr Rob Alexander	Safety analysis and testing of autonomous robots and multi-agent systems. Simulation methods for hazard analysis. Empirical evaluation of safety engineering methods and techniques.	Lecturer Computer Science
	Mr Michael Angus	Robotics technician with specific focus on the ARE project.	Technician Electronic Engineering
	Prof Alistair Boxall	Emerging and future ecological and health risks posed by chemical contaminants in the natural environment.	Professor Environment
	Dr Adrian Bors	Computer vision, computational intelligence, image processing, pattern recognition, neural networks, nonlinear digital signal processing and digital watermarking.	Lecturer Computer Science
	Edgar Buchanan	Research associated on the ARE project	Research Associate Electronic Engineering
	Mr Tim Clarke	Avionics, Bio-Inspired Computing, Cognitive Networking, Control Engineering, Evolutionary Algorithms, Fault-Tolerant Design, Flight Control, Multi-Agent Systems and Radar	Senior Lecturer Electronic Engineering
	Prof Peter Cowling	Building computer systems to help make decisions in games and resource optimisation, using tools from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operational Research (OR).	Professor Computer Science and Management
	Prof Gusz Eiben	Evolutionary computing: multi-parent recombintion, evolutionary contraint handling, evolutionary art, artificial life and evolutionary robotics. Self-reproducing robotic systems.	Visiting Professor Electronic Engineering (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
	Dr Daniel Franks	Animal behavior, with focus on analysing animal social networks, and developing methods & models for analysing animal societies.	Lecturer Biology and Computer Science
	Dr Michael Freeman	Multi-soft-core processor based systems, with hardware OS support in FPGA devices, applied to mobile robotic systems. Background interest in hardware architectures for high speed text processing and minimal CISC processor design.	Teaching Fellow Computer Science
‌	Dr Simon O'Keefe	Neural networks, in particular the theory and application of binary Correlation Matrix Memory neural networks. Non-standard computation, in particular bio-inspired and chem-inspired computing.	Lecturer Computer Science
	Dr James Hilder	Robotic hardware electronics design, currently focussed on swarm robotics and sensor design. Embedded computing. Bio-inspired algorithms, genetic algorithms and programming. Computer aided design and 2D\3D fabrication techniques. Machine vision, tracking and photography.	Robotics Laboratory Technician Computer Science and Electronic Engineering
	Dr Daniel Kudenko	Machine learning (specifically reinforcement learning), multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence for games, interacive drama, user modeling and data mining.	Lecturer Computer Science
	Dr Wei Li	Autonomous robots and computational intelligence, specifically in self-organizing robotic systems and co/evolutionary machine learning.	Research Associate Electronic Engineering
	Dr Alan Millard	Working on the SPANNER project - Self-repairing spiking neural networks for fault-tolerant robot control	Research Associate Electronic Engineering
‌	Dr Shuhei Miyashita	Shuhei Miyashita is a robotics researcher working on self-assembly and self-reconfigurable robots at multiple scales. His work pursuits formal understanding of synthesizing artificial compounds at the human scale, seeking a bio-inspired novel manufacturing method of robots. Originally from Tsukuba Science City in Japan, Miyashita received his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and later continued his research as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. He is currently the director of Microrobotics Group at the University of York in the UK.	Lecturer in Intelligent Robotics Director of the Microrobotics Group Electronic Engineering
	Becky Naylor	Researching robotic swarm simulation on the CoCoRo Project (underwater swarm robotics).	Research Associate Electronic Engineering
	Mayank Paymar	Collective robotic systems for environmental monitoring.	Marie Curie Research Fellow Electronic Engineering
	Dr Nick Pears	Computer vision, pattern recognition, in particular related to 3D imaging and 3D shape analysis. Specific projects include 3D face landmarking; 3D face modelling for medical applications; 3D shape matching for web retrieval; 2D/3D face recognition, visual tracking and recognition of human activity; real-time embedded architectures for vision.	Senior Lecturer Computer Science
	Dr Fiona Polack	Application and development of computer simulation to support scientific research (applications such as cancer neogenesis, cell dynamics, modelling novel computational substrates); model driven engineering (metamodelling, and domain specific languages); simulation of complex systems; emergent systems; validation arguments.	Senior Lecturer Computer Science
	Dr Andrew Pomfret	Control systems, biologically-inspired fault-tolerant systems, metamorphic systems, multi-objective optimisation.	Lecturer Electronic Engineering
	Prof Susan Stepney	Non-standard computation: bio-inspired algorithms, complex adaptive systems, emergent properties, nanite assemblers.	Professor Computer Science
	Dr Danesh Tarapore	Experience in design of fault-tolerant collective robotics systems, with research work in areas of evolutionary robotics, computational immunology, social biology, and use of robots as physical models in experimental biology.	Marie Curie Research Associate Electronic Engineering
	Prof Jon Timmis	Development of computational models of immune function (computational immunology), and fault-tolerance achieved via bio-inspired engineering with a focus on the immune system (immuno-engineering). Swarm robotic systems as a platform for testing our ideas realting to fault tolerence and anomaly detection. Modelling and simulation of complex systems.	Robotics Laboratory Director Professor of Intelligent and Adaptive Systems Electronic Engineering
	Dr Martin Trefzer	Using bio-inspired techniques to create scalable, fault-tolerant, adaptive and autonomous digital systems; dynamic and multi-reconfigurable architectures to tackle nano-scaled design.	Lecturer Electronic Engineering
	Prof Andy Tyrrell	Artificial Immune Systems, Bio-Inspired Computing, Evolutionary Algorithms, Evolutionary Computing, Fault-Tolerant Design, Microprocessor Design, Reconfigurable Systems	Head of Intelligent Systems Group Electronic Engineering
	Prof Alan Winfield	Mobile robotics: intelligent control, stable adaptive neural control and behaviour based control. Swarm robotics: algorithms, analysis, modelling and specification for potential high integrity applications.	Visiting Professor Electronic Engineering (Bristol Robotics Lab)

Previous Staff

Dr Ed Clark

2014 - Teaching fellow for the MSc Autonomous Robotics Engineering Course.

Collective robotics, emergent behaviour, artificial chemistries.

Teaching Fellow

Electronic Engineering

Dr Mark Read

2013 - Research associate on the CoCoRo Project. Now a Research Fellow and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney.

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

Dr Alex Turner

2013 - Researched software systems on the CoCoRo Project (underwater swarm robotics.) Now lecturing at Hull University.

Research Associate

Electronic Engineering

Research Students

Current Students

Post-Graduate Researchers

Name	Area of Research	Department
Sophie Alexander	Safe and Reliable Swarm Robotic Systems	Computer Science
Edgar Buchanan	Fault Tolerant Heterogeneous Swarms	Electronic Engineering
Naomi Gildert		Electronic Engineering
James O'Keefe	Evolvable Immune Systems for Swarm Robotics	Electronic Engineering
Oyinlola Oladiran	Evolvable Immune Systems for Swarm Robotics	Electronic Engineering
Matthew Prinold	Multi-Robots for Tracking Objects of Interest	Computer Science
Richard Redpath	Autonomous Swarm Exploration of Unknown Terrains	Electronic Engineering
Hao Sun	Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping using Consumer Grade 3D Cameras	Computer Science
Hao Wei	Safe and Reliable Swarm Robotic Systems	Computer Science
Guangsha Xu	Collective Task Allocation in Swarm Robotics	Electronic Engineering
Yuyuan Zhang	Metamorphic Architectures for Flying Robots	Electronic Engineering

MSc Intelligent Robotics

Name

Under-Graduate

Name	Area of Research	Department
Alex Butcher	Augmented reality debugging systems for robot swarms	Electronic Engineering
Antonio Figueirido	Voice-control of robot swarms using IBM Watson	Electronic Engineering
Nathaneal Young	Android application for PsiSwarm robot in education	Electronic Engineering

Alumni

PhD Students

Dr Ran Bi	Computer Science
Dr Rita Ismail	Computer Science
Dr Anna Ladi	Electronics
Dr Hui Keng Lau	Computer Science
Dr Tiong Hoo Lim	Computer Science
Dr Yang Liu	Electronics
Dr Lachlan Murray	Electronics
Dr Jenny Owen	Computer Science
Dr Nick Owens	Electronics
Dr Omer Qadir	Electronics
Dr James Stovold	Computer Science

MSc Students

Edgar Buchanen Berumen	2014
Huseyin Erdem	2014
Homero Silva Elizondo	2015
Robert Evans	2015
Cristian Valentin Fleseriu	2017
Yujia Gao ("Jessica")	2017
Matthew Hosier	2017
Samuel Jakobsen	2017
Chengqing Liu	2015
Mohammadshahid Memon	2014
Krishnan Nambiar	2014
Leonard Newbrook	2017
Mayank Paymar	2014
Alix Partridge	2017
Jose Maria Rivas	2017
Muhammad Rizzuwan Bin Abdul Wahid	2014
Zihui Wang	2017
Shengsong Yang	2015
Dingdian Zhang	2017

Undergraduate Students

Alexander Horsfield	Electronics	Design of an Android-based teaching app. for PsiSwarm Robots
Georgi Hristov	Electronics	Pattern formation in E-Puck Robots
Patrick Hutton	Computer Science	Search, localisation and recruitment with drone Robots
Ali Jewers	Electronics	Augmented reality debugging systems for robot swarms
Artjoms Rizihs	Computer Science	Swarming algorithms with Pi Swarm Robots