OXFORD UNIVERSITY COMPUTING LABORATORY
Grade 7 Research Assistant Post
in
SUAAVE Project: Sensing Unmanned Autonomous Aerial VEhicles
Oxford University Computing Laboratory (OUCL) has been awarded an EPSRC grant to investigate the principles underlying the control of clouds of networked resource-limited unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) acting as sensor platforms in a variety of scenarios, like search-and-rescue, security and surveillance. This research is led by Dr Niki Trigoni and Dr Stephen Cameron at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, in collaboration with Dr Stephen Hailes and Dr Simon Julier at University College London, and Professor Gerard Parr and Professor Sally McClean at the University of Ulster.The project will employ a postdoctoral Research Assistant and two doctoral students at OUCL, and has the aim of engineering a fully autonomous aerial platform consisting of multiple helicopter UAVs capable of searching for a given target.
The Research Assistant (RA) will work with the doctoral students on the following tasks: 1) investigating the trade-offs between sensing coverage and network connectivity in the context of target detection and tracking by a group of UAVs; 2) designing distributed search algorithms for dynamic environments where the requirements for coverage and connectivity of UAVscontinuously change over time; 3) extending distributed search algorithms to take into account context information provided by experts via the ground stations; 4) taking into account the geography of the environment and the presence of other vehicles when tasking the UAVs (path planning); 5) investigating the potential for using visual detection of aerial obstacles(sense and avoid), and other safety issues; 6) implementing and evaluating search algorithms in real and simulation environments; and 7) presenting information in a coherent and easily comprehensible way to search teams and to the situation commander;
Salary will be on the University grade 7 scale (currently £27,466 - £33,780 p.a). The post is available from is available from October 2008 (with latest start date in January 2009) for three years, is pensionable and includes an annual leave entitlement of 38 days per year, inclusive of public holidays and university closed periods.
Further details, including the application procedure can be obtained here or via email request to job12@comlab.ox.ac.uk
The Closing date for applications is Monday 25th August 2008.
Oxford University is and Equal Opportunities Employer.
