MSc in
Robotics
Supervisors (2020/2021)
We have a number of faculty members with a diversity of
knowledge and experience from both two schools, EPS and MACS. A list of supervisors
with their short bio can be found below.
Xianwen Kong (Programme
Co-Director), EPS
Patricia
A. Vargas (Programme
Co-Director), MACS
Alexander Belyaev, EPS
Frank
Broz, MACS
Christian Dondrup, MACS
Mauro Dragone, EPS
Ekaterina Komendantskaya, MACS
Yvan Petillot, EPS
Ron
Petrick, MACS
Sen Wang,
EPS
Xianwen Kong is currently an Associate Professor in the
School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. His research
interests include mechanisms, robotics, mechatronics and their applications in
manufacture and renewable energy. He developed a systematic approach to the
creative design of parallel manipulators and compliant parallel manipulators
and initiated the research on disassembly-free reconfigurable parallel
manipulators. He has authored or co-authored one monograph published in English
by Springer in 2007 with its Russian translation and Chinese translation
by the Russian publisher FIZMATLIT – Nauka
Publishers and the China Machine Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively, two U.S.
patents and a number of publications in journals and conference proceedings. He is a
Fellow of ASME (America Society of Mechanical Engineers), an associate editor for Mechanism and Machine Theory,
Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics,
and IEEE RA-L as well as a committee
member of ASME (America Society of Mechanical Engineers) Mechanisms and
Robotics Committee.
Patricia A. Vargas, PhD, is the Founder Director of the Robotics
Laboratory, Director of Ethics and Associate Professor/Reader in Computer
Science and Robotics at the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at
Heriot–Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. She is an executive member of the
Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. She is also an IEEE Senior Member and Fellow of
the Higher Education Academy, plus an exec member of the IEEE Ro-Man Standing
Steering Committee. She was a post-doc at the Centre for Computational
Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, UK for 3 years. Her research
interests include Evolutionary and Bio-inspired Robotics, Swarm Robotics,
Computational Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Human–Robot Interaction,
Rehabilitation Robotics and Neurorobotics.
Dr Alexander
Belyaev is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of Sensors,
Signals and Systems, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University,
UK. His main research topics are digital geometry processing, mathematical
image analysis, and applied partial differential equations, on which he
published more than one hundred articles in international conferences and
journals. Belyaev co-authored several Best Paper Award-winning papers at
international conferences. Some of his works on surface reconstruction from
scattered point data, shape feature extraction, and mesh filtering are widely
cited and used by students and scholars worldwide.
Dr Frank Broz's research interests are in human-robot
interaction, social robotics, AI, and machine learning. Particular topics of
interest are nonverbal behaviours (especially gaze) and planning under
uncertainty for HRI. Prior to joining Heriot-Watt, he was a research fellow at
Plymouth University and the University of Hertfordshire working on
projects in developmental and assistive robotics. He completed his PhD at the
Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute on the use of time-dependent POMDPs to model ambiguous socially situated
interaction tasks.
Christian Dondrup is the director of the HRI MSc programme
and the director of the BEng Robotics Joint Education Programme with Ocean
University China. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of
Mathematical and Computer Sciences. He is the Co-I on the Socially Pertinent
Robots in Gerontological Healthcare (SPRING) project.
Christian finished his PhD in Computer Science in 2016 at the
University of Lincoln, UK as part of the STRANDS FP7 EU project concerned with
long-term autonomy for mobile robots. His thesis focused on human-aware
navigation in ever-changing human-populated environments and how qualitative
spatial relations can be used to abstract from the metric world in order to achieve robust navigation approaches. Before
that, he received the Diplom degree (equivalent to
MSc) in computer science in the natural sciences from Bielefeld University
(Germany) in 2012. His thesis involved developmental robotics and speech
recognition, focusing on human-robot interaction in tutoring scenarios. Before
his employment as an Assistant Professor, Christian was a Research Fellow at
the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK and involved in the MuMMER H2020 EU project.
Christian's research interests focus on Human-Robot
Interaction in general. This includes fields such as social robots, robots in
health care, human-aware navigation, planning and control of robots for HRI, spatio-temporal relations, and human-robot verbal
interaction to name a few.
Dr Mauro Dragone's background is in the area of cognitive
robotics, human-robot interaction, multi-agent systems, software engineering
and Internet of Things (IoT). He is a graduate
at Bologna University (BSc in Computer Science) and University College Dublin
(PhD in Computer Science). He has
participated to European IoT projects
and led the EU project RUBICON, building self-learning smart
spaces combining sensors, actuators and robots working together to accomplish
complex tasks and with the ability to autonomously adapt to new environments
and to changing and evolving requirements. At Heriot-Watt, Dr. Dragone set up
the Robotic Assisted Living
Testbed, a home-like environment
where roboticists and computer scientists, and also usability and health
experts, psychologists, and sociologists, can work alongside people with
assisted living needs and those supporting them, to co-design and test
innovative solutions for healthy ageing and assisted living.
Ekaterina
Komendantskaya is a logician with keen interest in AI and verification of
autonomous systems. She holds a PhD from the department of Mathematics,
University College Cork, Ireland, with her PhD
thesis “Learning and Deduction in Neural Networks and Logic”
(2007) devoted to the topic of Neuro-Symbolic integration. She held a
postdoctoral position in INRIA, France (2007-2008), devoted to the development
of the interactive theorem prover Coq. She came to Scotland in 2008 with EPSRC
Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science ``Computational Logic in
Artificial Neural Networks” (2008-2011). Since then, she held various
positions at St Andrews, Dundee and Heriot-Watt universities, and has been a PI
in further 3 EPSRC grants on logic and verification. She is currently an
associate professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University. At
Heriot-Watt, she leads a research lab on "AI and Verification"
(LAIV.uk). MSc students who join LAIV.uk work closely with LAIV researchers and
PhD students, and become an integral part of the lab. In 2018-19, LAIV MSc
students worked on various topics concerning Neural network Verification,
achieved great results (see http://laiv.uk/index.php/laiv-publications/), with dissertation marks ranging between 85% and 95%,
were nominated for best dissertation prizes, received James Watt Scholarship to
do a PhD or moved on to prestigious positions in other universities. This
year as well, we are inviting exceptional students to join LAIV.uk efforts on
AI verification.
Yvan Petillot is a Professor of Robotics and Computer Vision at
Heriot-Watt University since 2008. Yvan studied engineering and
Telecommunications in France at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécomnunications
de Bretagne in France, graduating in 1991. This was followed by a PhD in Image
processing which he defended in 1996. After a short period in industry, he
joined Heriot-Watt University in 1997 as a Research Associate and was recruited
as a lecturer in 2001. He is a leading member of the Oceans Systems Laboratory
and the head of the Institute for Sensor Signals and Systems in the school of Engineering
and Physical Sciences. Until August 2015, he was also a Royal Society Industry
Fellow in collaboration with SeeByte Ltd, a company
he co-founded in 2001 and in which he was Chief Technical Officer until 2010.
With over 20 years experience in Subsea Robotics,
Image Processing and Autonomous Systems in the maritime domain, he has made
very significant contributions to target detection and classification multiple
vehicle collaboration and autonomous inspection and manipulation.
Dr Ron Petrick is an Associate Professor
in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University
and a member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. His research interests
include automated planning, cognitive robotics, and interactive systems, with a
recent focus on the application of planning techniques to robot systems
deployed in real-world environments. He is particularly interested in the use
of automated planning in scenarios involving human-robot interaction,
collaboration, and plan explainability.