Biography
Rhys joined the ORI as a Engineering Science DPhil student in 2020 at Lincoln College. Rhys is suprvised by Dr. Lars Kunze as part of the Cognitive Robotics Group. His current DPhil research is focused around construction casual models based upon features and actions perceived in the environment. Additionally Rhys works as a member of a team headed by Lars researching into novelty analysis as part of the Horizon 2020 Autonomous Decision Making in Very Long Traverses project. Rhys completed an integrated Master's degree in Computer Science as part of a five year course at the University of Birmingham. One of these years was an industrial year, carried out at the warehouse automation company, Guidance Automation Limited. Rhys' Master's dissertation was supervised by Dr. Claudio Zito and primarily focused on researching the application of machine learning biasing techniques applied to a data-driven push manipulation forward model. Following the completion of his degree, Rhys went on to carry out work into visual servoing and deformable object tracking with Dr. Alireza Rastegarpanah at the Extreme Robotics Lab, University of Birmingham, through the course of several research assistant contracts. His areas of interest within robotics consist of constructing models with parallels between artificial and human cognition and the resulting comparisons and improved robot-human understanding. Outside of robotics Rhys enjoys working on CGI based projects and occasionally playing video games.
