About
Danesh Tarapore is an Associate Professor of Robotics at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on resilient autonomy: how robots can adapt, recover and cooperate when operating in complex real-world environments where conventional assumptions about sensing, mobility and control break down.
His work spans adaptive and embodied robotics, swarm and multi-robot systems, and field robotics. He has contributed to research on robot adaptation following damage, including work published in Nature, and has developed a broader research programme around resilience and adaptation in autonomous systems.
A major current focus is the use of forest environments as accessible, demanding testbeds for studying autonomous robots under physical complexity, uncertainty and failure, with applications in environmental monitoring and natural environments.
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Research
Research interests
- Resilient autonomy
- Field robotics
- Swarm and multi-robot systems
- Robotics in natural environments
- Adaptive robotics
Current research
My current research investigates how autonomous robots can remain effective when unexpected physical and environmental conditions disrupt normal operation.
A particular focus is resilient embodied autonomy: enabling robots to detect physical constraints or failures, understand what has happened, and adapt or recover using their own sensing, morphology, dynamics and interaction with the environment. I am interested in approaches that exploit proprioception, active probing, momentum and environmental interaction rather than relying solely on increasingly complex sensing and hardware.
I also study collective and swarm robotics outside controlled laboratory settings, including how multi-robot systems cope with individual failures, environmental constraints, unreliable communication and heterogeneous capabilities.
Forests are a major experimental testbed for this work, providing a challenging but accessible environment for repeated real-world experimentation with wheeled and legged robots.
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Current research
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Supervision
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Teaching
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Biography
Danesh Tarapore is an Associate Professor of Robotics in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on resilient autonomy: how robots can adapt, recover and cooperate when operating in complex real-world environments where conventional assumptions about sensing, mobility and control break down.
His work spans adaptive and embodied robotics, swarm and multi-robot systems, and field robotics. He has contributed to research on robot adaptation following damage, including work published in Nature and featured on its cover, and subsequently developed a broader research programme around resilience and adaptation in autonomous systems.
A major current focus is the use of forests as accessible, demanding real-world testbeds for robotics. His group works with wheeled and legged robots on problems including navigation under degraded perception, physical entrapment and recovery, low-cost forest sensing, and scalable environmental monitoring using multiple robots.
Earlier research has included resilient robot swarms and environmentally adaptive marine robotic systems. He is particularly interested in multidisciplinary academic and industry collaborations that bring robotics to difficult real-world problems.
Danesh received his PhD from the University of Lausanne and his MEng from IIT Bombay. He was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and has led research funded by EPSRC and the Alan Turing Institute.
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Prizes
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