Kun Qian is currently a Lecturer in Robot-assisted Manufacturing at the University of Manchester (UoM). He received his B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Leeds (UoL) in 2016 and 2017, respectively, and earned his Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Robotic Control from UoL in 2022. Before joining UoM in 2024 as a Research Associate (RA) in Robot-assisted Manufacturing, he worked as a RA in Robot-assisted Precision Assembly at Heriot-Watt University from 2023 to 2024, and as a Research Fellow in Rehabilitation Robotics at UoL in 2022. Dr. Qian has authored and co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and has actively collaborated with manufacturing professionals, product designers, and both local and international industries for multidisciplinary projects funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF).

His research focuses on developing innovative control and machine vision technologies for robot-assisted manufacturing and human-robot collaborative systems. His interests include quality control in large-scale additive manufacturing (3D printing), vision-based environment proprioception, and intelligent human-robot collaboration to meet versatile manufacturing needs. Broadly, he is particularly interested in adopting highly multidisciplinary approaches to enhance the scalability, productivity, and flexibility of current manufacturing and robotic systems, and in developing AI-driven solutions to support system adaptation in complex and unstructured scenarios.

Dr. Qian is looking for enthusiastic and highly motivated candidates to conduct PhD research. If you are interested in the areas listed in the Research Interests section, please feel free to contact [email protected] for discussions.

Example PhD Projects:

-Large-scale On-site Manufacturing with Closed-loop 3D Printing and Autonomous Reconstruction

-Human-in-the-loop Robot Collaboration for Smart manufacturing

-Multi-view Geometry-aware 3D Reconstruction for In-situ Monitoring and Manufacturing Quality Control