About the project
In the future, autonomous systems are poised to become widely available to assist us with our mobility throughout our day to day lives. Future autonomous technologies will effectively maintain the infrastructure of our cities, dependably manage our road traffic to maximise flow and minimise environmental impact.
To realise this future we require resilient automated transport systems that can avoid, withstand, recover from, adapt, and evolve to handle uncertainty, adversity, and disruption. Alongside this we must also consider how autonomous technologies will interact with human users, ensuring inclusive, empathetic and ethical design. Human Factors offers the opportunity to assess and respond to these requirements by developing methods and practises to capture resilience.
We are inviting applications for PhD studentship in human factors engineering within the Transportation Research Group. The project will focus on resilience within automated transport systems, developing methods to assess resilience and enhance the response of transport networks to possible disruptions. It will develop methods to understand how automated transport systems meet technical specification as well as how they adhere to social legal, ethical, empathy and cultural rules. These methods will then be assessed on their reliability and validity through user testing.
Utilising the Southampton University Driving Simulator and the newly-created Virtual Reality Cave, interactions between different road user types will be investigated, providing the opportunity to develop theory and test it with real world applications.
This PhD project will sit within a wider EPSRC-funded project into Trustworthy Autonomous Systems which will undertake research across a variety of different automated domains with input from computer scientists, engineers, psychologists, philosophers, lawyers, and mathematicians. The University of Southampton will focus on transportation but with the opportunity to work collaboratively with other domains, for example emergency response and assistive care.
We are seeking a candidate across a broad range of areas who can prove that they can undertake independent research into this new and exciting field. Ideally, the candidate will have some previous experience in human factors, psychology and engineering related to automation, automated systems and/or transportation.
