About Me
10 Mar 2022
My name is Tsvetan Zhivkov. I am a postdoctoral researcher with Lincoln Agri-Robotics (LAR) at the University of Lincoln (UoL). My staff directory page. I started this position immediately after my PhD defense in May 2020.
My postdoctoral role is exclusively on research and development of agricultural-robotics. I am working on communication issues in agricultural-robotics along other exciting projects. I was lucky enough to acquire a certified commercial drone pilot license to help other projects, by gathering images for spatial and temporal crop growth, field mapping and analysis for crop care, etc.
Postgraduate
I received my PhD degree from King’s College London on October 2020. I was part of the Interaction Lab group. The group did research on a wide variety of topics (e.g. human-robot interaction, task allocation mechanisms, multi-robot communication and swarm robotics). My supervisor was Professor Elizabeth Sklar, she is a great mentor and scholar!
My PhD research focused on multi-robot system design and communication. I investigated how network quality can affect both explicit and implicit communication. More often in multi-robot domains, communication is imperative and in some operational environments it’s not possible to maintain/deploy network infrastructure. In these cases, robots with even minimal network capabilities can dynamically create an ad-hoc network infrastructure to continue communicating and performing tasks regardless of what happens to the remote (server/operator). My research looked at multi-robot communication and message-passing as a mission critical component. Creating redundancy of “critical” information on a local and global scale. Therefore even if a single robot communicates with the remote operator, complete knowledge of the mission is established.
Undergraduate
I received my MEng in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from the University of Liverpool. In my final year at the university, I was part of a group project titled “Robot Object Search and Retrieval Team”. I was tasked with designing a human-computer interaction (HCI) user interface that would receive messages from a python server and translate them on screen to something meaningful. This allowed users to understand and interact with a robot team that was performing pre-given tasks.
In the summer between my third and fourth year I worked for the university as a vocational worker/researcher developing an iOS application. I was tasked with creating an intuitive text and image recording app, which would store data locally on its user and allow the data to be offloaded later to a server. The app was used in a multi-agency emergency response exercise (JESIP) in accordance with data protection acts (of that time) and with complete knowledge and acceptance of the end user.