The University Of Birmingham Extreme Robotics Lab (ERL) is one of Europe’s most prominent research labs dedicated to nuclear and other extreme environment applications of advanced robotics and AI.
Professor Rustam Stolkin serves as the Chair in Robotics and Royal Society Industry Fellow in the School of Metallurgy and Materials. He leads the Extreme Robotics Lab (ERL), Europe's most prominent university research lab dedicated to nuclear and other extreme environment applications of advanced robotics and AI.
Rustam is an interdisciplinary engineer with diverse research interests, although mainly focusses on robotics. His main interests include vision and sensing, robotic grasping and manipulation, robotic vehicles, human-robot interaction, AI and machine learning.
The University of Birmingham Extreme Robotics Lab has established one of the largest and best-equipped robotics research facilities in the UK. This comprises a 1,000m2 academic lab on campus, and a large rig-hall space at Birmingham Energy Innovation Centre containing large-scale heavy-duty manipulators.
The ERL team is known internationally as leaders in the application of advanced robotics to extreme environment industrial challenges. The team are particularly well known for their work on autonomous robotic manipulation driven by computer vision, however the research portfolio spans a wide range of core robotics and AI technologies that include:
“Significant advances are needed, beyond the technologies currently available, to develop robotic systems that can carry out complex tasks in hazardous environments, remote from human operators. In such cases situational awareness may be limited and communications difficult, requiring robots to have greater on-board intelligence and autonomous control capabilities. Novel sensors and advanced machine vision and perception will be needed for robots to navigate their environment and do useful work. High consequence, safety-critical interventions may still need a human to be in control, however, but these may be too complex for familiar forms of tele-operation, e.g. joystick. This creates an opportunity for novel approaches where operators and AI collaborate, in real time, to control remote machinery in very challenging environments.”