The Birmingham Extreme Robotics Lab (ERL) is Europe’s most prominent university lab dedicated to nuclear and other extreme environment applications of advanced robotics and AI.

Birmingham ERL researchers developed the state-of-the-art algorithms and control methods which recently achieved the first ever deployments in history of autonomous robots in nuclear sites (AI-controlled, vision-guided grasping of inactive waste materials at NNL Workington in 2016, and AI-controlled, vision-guided robotic laser-cutting of contaminated metal inside a real radioactive hot-cell at NNL Preston in 2017).

Latest news: Dr Rustam Stolkin: Robots that learn: nuclear robotics meets machine learning (Royal Society blog)

The challenge

Our projects

Our robotics and AI technologies

Professor Rustam Stolkin and his team are developing beyond state-of-the-art technology which will revolutionise robotics in hazardous environments.

Also in 'Metallurgy and Materials Research'

• School of Metallurgy and Materials
• Reusing and Recycling Energy Technologies at Birmingham
• Metallurgy and Materials research
• PhD opportunities
• Crystal Growth
• High Temperature Oxidation Group
• Hydrogen Materials Group
• Robotics in extreme environments
• Magnetic Materials Group
• Electron Microscopy Group
• Engineering and Physical Sciences research