I completed my PhD in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group in the University of Southampton's Electronics and Computer Science department in 2016, after researching algorithms for UAV coordination in disaster response.
There's more: Publications PhD Blog |
What I do |
My area of research focused on co-ordinating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or ground vehicles (UGVs) in disaster relief environments. Essentially, I worked towards developing algorithms that allow the vehicles to co-ordinate amongst themselves to help complete tasks for emergency services. This could involve tracking a cloud of radiation, or finding at-risk civilians, or imaging a building for the fire service to decide whether to enter to search for survivors.
For a quick summary, this is my entry for the faculty Three Minute Thesis competition in 2014. For a not-quick summary, this is my final thesis. My research fell under the remit of the Orchid Project - which was a collaboration of Universities and businesses working broadly in "agents" and specifically in crowd-sourcing, smart energy, and disaster relief. |
Bio |
I graduated with a first class MPhys (Hons) in Physics in 2012 from the University of Southampton. My final year thesis involved computational quantum mechanics and furthered my interest in computing and coding. After attending a seminar on available PhDs in the ECS department I was fascinated at the work being done with computerised agents and succesfully attained a place in the AIC group under Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn. I passed my viva and submitted my final thesis in September of 2016.
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Publications |
Baker, Chris, Ramchurn, Gopal, Teacy, Luke and Jennings, Nicholas (2016) Factored Monte-Carlo tree search for coordinating UAVs in disaster response. In, Distributed and Multi-Agent Planning, London, GB, 14 Jun 2016. ICAPS
Baker, Chris, Ramchurn, Gopal, Teacy, Luke and Jennings, Nicholas (2016) Planning search and rescue missions for UAV teams. In, PAIS 2016: Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems at ECAI 2016, The Hague, NL, 31 Aug - 02 Sep 2016. IOS Press Baker, Chris (2016) A Combined Mechanism for UAV Explorative Path Planning, Task Allocation and Predictive Placement. Doctoral Thesis, University of Southampton |