My time is mainly devoted to software development work and exploring research projects

Photo of student Marwan Khaled
Marwan Taher
Research Engineer, Dyson Robotics Lab at Imperial College
MEng Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering with a Year in Industry
2021
Marwan works at the Dyson Robotics Lab, at Imperial College London in a research focused role and interested in doing a PhD in mobile robotics in the future.

"I work at the Dyson Robotics Lab, at Imperial College in London. We do robotics research with a focus on scene representation and understanding, using vision-based sensors, to enable robots to interact with their environment to perform complex tasks such as manipulation and navigation."

"Most of my day is spent on my current active project, where my time is mainly devoted to software development work alongside exploring relevant published research projects. The day is also filled with interactions with the other lab members discussing and exchanging ideas about what we are doing and the problems we are currently facing."

"We have a weekly reading group where one of the lab members presents a paper that they find interesting. We then follow this up with a discussion about the methods and ideas presented in this paper and how we can apply them to our projects."

"I mostly collaborate with the PhD students in the lab to extend their work, adding new features such as getting their systems to work with a new sensor, along with providing general software development support."

"I also get to work on my own projects where I get to experiment with new ideas and techniques related to scene representation using neural networks. Moreover, I get to do some teaching assistance for a robotics course, where I provide support during the practical labs."

"The theory and skills I have learned from the control and robotics modules I did during my degree along with the final year master’s project, provide me with the knowledge that I use in my day-to-day work. Along with that, the skills I gained from the student-led projects I practiced in not only provided me with technical skills, but also non-technical skills such as teamwork, organisation, and time management provided me with immense value in the workplace."

"In the future I am interested in doing a PhD in robotics focusing on perception for mobile robots."

"My advice to current students would be to try to apply what you study in a practical way whenever possible, whether through writing some software or building some hardware. A great way to achieve this is via joining student-led activities, where you will definitely find something interesting to work on, applying your knowledge and expanding it."

"I had a great time at Sheffield as alongside my course I got to take part in multiple extra-curricular activities such as robotics competitions, which provided me with enjoyable challenges while gaining valuable experiences. I also got to meet and interact with a lot of interesting people since the campus was very diverse and international, bringing people from different backgrounds, which was a very eye-opening experience."

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