Rustam Stolkin

University of Birmingham’s Extreme Robotics Lab has internationally leading expertise in developing advanced robotics control methods, and has a particular focus on applying them to problems involving extreme environments, especially in the nuclear domain. Rustam is currently leading >£11million in live research grants, with active research collaborations spanning 9 countries on 4 continents. He leads major funded robotics collaborations with the nuclear agencies of UK, France, Japan and South Korea, as well as with NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in USA. He is co-ordinator of the €6.8million H2020 RoMaNS (Robotic Manipulation for Nuclear Sort and Segregation) project, spanning five institutions in three countries. RoMaNS is the largest robotics research grant so far awarded under the European Commission’s H2020 programme, and represents the largest consortium of robotics researchers in history to ever work on nuclear applications. Rustam also leads the £720,000 robotics project of the UK-Korea Civil Nuclear Collaboration, leads a £1.75 million project of the new EPSRC Remote Sensing in Extreme Environments (EE) programme, and leads the £2million Birmingham component of the new £5.5million 5-years EPSRC programme Robotics for Nuclear Environments. He also has had >£half-million funding from UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, MoD Dstl and other sources for EE robotics. Rustam also leads a 3-year £250,000 Knowledge Transfer Partnership with KUKA – top multi-national robot manufacturer. Rustam will first introduce nuclear challenges for remote manipulation, present a brief history of what has so far been achieved by the UK nuclear industry, and highlight the major remaining unsolved challenges. He will then provide an overview of H2020 RoMaNS and other projects, and present very recent advances in state-of-the-art robotics that have been developed by his team at Birmingham.