PhD Opportunities in Mechatronics in United Kingdom

Newcastle University is offering a four-year PhD studentship through the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Process Industries: Net Zero. The project focuses on developing an endurant power and propulsion system for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs operating in offshore energy infrastructure. AUVs are increasingly important for inspecting offshore wind installations, subsea cables, and fixed or floating energy platforms. Current inspection and maintenance approaches often depend on crewed...

Jiaqi Ye, Assistant Professor in AI and Robotics at the University of Birmingham, is seeking a PhD student for research in robot perception, robotics and computer vision within the School of Engineering. The research explores how robots can move beyond recognising objects to understanding their physical properties and interacting with them reliably in complex, changing environments. The work combines computer vision, multimodal sensing and deep learning to support robust robotic perception and a...

This funded PhD opportunity is based in the research team at the University of Leeds and focuses on soft robotics and mechanobiology. The project will advance CellQ-Twin , a soft robotic cell-stretching platform designed to investigate how mechanical forces influence cellular behaviour in health and disease. The research addresses multiaxial and rhythmic mechanobiology and brings together soft robotics, biomedical engineering and cellular research. The work may be applied to several biological a...

The UCL EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award (UELA) offers approximately 50 fully funded PhD studentships for the 2027/28 academic year at University College London. Around 130 advertised doctoral projects span the breadth of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) remit. Projects cover a wide range of engineering, physical sciences, computing, mathematical, materials, and related research areas. The catalogue includes both standard projects and collaborative projects co-funded ...

Newcastle University is advertising two PhD studentships through the Process Industries Net Zero (PINZ) Centre for Doctoral Training, focused on offshore energy and maritime decarbonisation. The research is connected with industrial partners and the university’s Marine Technology and marine hydrodynamics environment. Optimising Green Methanol Utilisation for Net-Zero Offshore Vessels This project will investigate technologies for methanol-powered offshore vessels. The successful researcher will ...

[Full tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of £23,805 for Home, EU and International students.] This PhD in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London explores programmable matter through entangled architected materials —networks of curved filaments whose stiffness and toughness come from the way their elements interweave and contact one another. The project asks whether a material’s mechanical behaviour, normally fixed at manufacture, can instead be changed after fabricati...

The University of Leeds School of Mathematics is recruiting the 2027 cohort for its EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Fluid Dynamics. The programme is designed for students who want to use fluid dynamics to tackle real-world challenges through advanced mathematical and research training. This is an integrated four-year MSc + PhD pathway combining postgraduate study with doctoral research. Students will develop expertise in future fluid dynamics while benefiting from bespoke training a...

The University of Birmingham is offering a PhD studentship examining the physics of learning in robotic metamaterials , at the intersection of robotics, soft matter physics, mechanical engineering, applied mathematics and materials science. The project investigates active mechanical metamaterials and distributed robotic systems: networks of sensors and actuators that communicate locally to produce collective functionality. Inspired by living systems such as starfish and bacteria, these mechanica...

Imperial College London is offering a PhD studentship in the Department of Aeronautics focused on real-time data assimilation for multi-physics flows . The project addresses a central challenge in engineering prediction: physics-based models can extrapolate to unobserved conditions but contain uncertain parameters and neglected physical effects, while measurements provide information about the true system state but are sparse and noisy. The doctoral research will develop bias-aware data assimila...