Professor Robert Richardson

Profile

Professor Robert Richardson is the Director of the Institute of Design, Robotics and Optimisation and Director of the Leeds EPSRC National Facility for Innovative Robotic Systems, a world class, £4.3M facility for designing and creating robotic systems initiated in August 2013.  He is Professor of Robotics and a Fellow of the IMechE.

He held a prestigious research contract to explore The Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt using robotic technology and has discovered writing in the Great Pyramid that was hidden for thousands of years. The New Scientist magazine placed his discoveries in the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2011. In 2008 he was successful in developing air and ground robotic systems that reached the final of the UK MOD Grand Challenge.

He received a BEng and PhD from the University of Leeds in 1997 & 2001 respectively. In 2003 he took up the position of Lecturer in Robotics, in the School of Computer Science, the University of Manchester, UK. He returned to Leeds in 2008 and was appointed Professor of Robotics in 2015.

Research interests

His current research interests include:

Exploration robotics for safety and security - Protecting life by accessing confined spaces to find trapped victims, gather information on terrorist and military threats, inspect inaccessible industrial plants or processes utilising enhanced sensing and networking.

Surgical technologies for health and well-being - Lengthening life through new and less invasive procedures, improving recovery time and post-operative scarring.

Rehabilitation and prosthetics for health and wellbeing - Improving quality of life through restorative and assistive devices. Focus on small scale subsystems that form the larger devices.

He has published in a diverse range of journals including; Journal of Field Robotics; Sensors and actuators: A Physical; Control engineering practice; Robotica and IEEE transactions on Mechatronics. He is a member of the Editorial board of the international journal of Biomechatronics and biomedical robotics. Inderscience. His work has been featured in all major science magazines including the New scientist and Popular science.  Newspapers in every continent have featured stories on his work.  He has been involved television broadcasts globally including the discovery channel, BBC news, Sky Sports, ITN news and the Gadget Show.

Research groups and institutes

• Institute of Design, Robotics and Manufacturing
• Robotics
• Bio-mechatronics and robotics