Dr James O'Keeffe - University of York

Dr O'Keeffe's current research focuses on developing autonomous robot swarms for subterranean excavation. Subterranean excavation is a dangerous task that currently depends on human labour, making it a natural target for automation. Swarm robots are especially suited to this type of task, which is dangerous and covers a large area, because of their multiplicity and redundancy of hardware. Although swarm robotics as a field of research has existed for decades, deployment of practical autonomous swarms has been so far limited to highly controlled warehouse environments with additional centralised tracking and control infrastructure. Centralised control negates a key advantage of swarm robots: the lack of a single point of failure. Dr O'Keeffe will design distributed swarm systems that can maintain their own autonomy in hazardous GPS-denied environments through strategic coordination, power management, and fault tolerance.