Robots and intelligent environments
I study how robots can perceive, navigate and adapt, and how sensing and computation in their surroundings can support their autonomy.
I am an Associate Professor in Mobile Robotics at the University of Oxford, based at the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Oxford e-Research Centre. I co-lead the Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) with Professor Paul Newman and am a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science at Keble College.
Research interests
A central focus of my work is site-driven robotics: designing robots together with the environments in which they operate. We investigate how existing cameras, communication networks and shared computing can support robot perception, navigation and control. The aim is to make autonomous systems easier to deploy and operate in existing buildings and infrastructure.
Alongside this, I work on perception, mapping and localisation using vision, lidar and radar. I am interested in how robots can learn from experience, adapt to changing conditions and recognise the limits of what they know.
With colleagues and students in the Mobile Robotics Group, I connect these ideas to experiments and field deployments, from warehouses and urban roads to off-road environments in the Scottish Highlands.
Explore my selected work for examples, or browse the full publication list.
Background
I joined the Mobile Robotics Group at Oxford in 2018. My background spans mechanical and mechatronics engineering, with a PhD from the University of Pavia. My doctoral research explored real-time scheduling and energy management in cyber-physical systems.