The University of Birmingham Extreme Robotics Lab (ERL) is the largest university/academic team in the world of expert roboticists dedicated to nuclear problems.
ERL runs at a steady state of around 10 Post-Doctoral Research Fellows and 10 doctoral research students, operating under Professor Rustam Stolkin, with an technical and administrative support team. The university is currently building a new 420m2 lab space dedicated to nuclear robotics, which we plan to enlarge to 800m2 with the acquisition of additional faculty and support engineers.
“University of Birmingham (UoB) is nationally prominent in many kinds of nuclear research, especially decommissioning related areas, and has the largest and oldest nuclear engineering masters programme in the UK, which has trained numerous members of the UK nuclear workforce. UoB is also internationally outstanding in robotics, having won more €multi-million H2020 and FP7 European Commission robotics projects than any other UK university in recent years. It is natural then that UoB has become known worldwide as a particular centre of excellence for nuclear robotics, an area that was founded and developed at UoB by Prof. Rustam Stolkin, who is now Royal Society Industry Fellow for Nuclear Robotics, as well as leader of the H2020 RoMaNS (Robotic Manipulation for Nuclear Sort and Segregation) project, the largest robotics project yet funded by H2020, and the only EU robotics project focused on nuclear applications.
Professor Stolkin leads £11million in live projects, spanning three continents, including funded collaborations with nuclear agencies of four countries. His Royal Society Industry Fellowship embeds him 50% inside the UK nuclear industry, uniquely positioning him to transfer state-of-the-art technologies from academia to high consequence, safety-critical industrial problems of enormous societal importance.”