Paul Newman (engineer)
British robotics engineer, academic and entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Michael Newman CBE FREng (born 1973[1]) is a British engineer and academic who founded the Oxford Robotics Institute.[2] He is the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford,[3] and head of the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group (MRG).[3]
Paul Newman | |
|---|---|
| Citizenship | British |
| Education | PhD. |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney |
| Known for | Founding Oxford Robotics Institute & Oxa |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Robotics Information engineering Autonomous vehicles |
| Workplaces | University of Oxford Keble College, Oxford Oxa |
| Thesis | On the structure and solution of the simultaneous localisation and map building problem (1999) |
| Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte | |
| Website | robots |
In 2014, he co-founded Oxa with Ingmar Posner,[4] noted for developing the first self-driving cars on British roads.[5]
Education
Newman received an MEng in Engineering Science from Balliol College, Oxford in 1995, followed by a PhD in autonomous navigation from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, Australia.[4]
Career and research
Newman’s work on autonomous vehicle technology has led him to author 200 papers and garner over 15,000 citations.[4] He has an h-index of 72 according to Google Scholar.[6] In his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney, Newman set out the fundamentals of the large-scale navigation problem SLAM, which would later become one of the most cited papers in the field at over 3,000 citations.[4]
Following his PhD in 1999 under Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,[1][7] Newman worked as a Navigation Engineer at Sonardyne International, UK, in 1999 and 2000, where he wrote the navigation algorithms which underpinned operation of autonomous sub-sea vehicles dealing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.[8]
In 2000, Newman left industry for MIT, where he was a postdoctoral research scientist, working with Professor John J. Leonard on large-scale field robotics both on land and in the ocean.[4]
He became a Departmental Lecturer in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford in 2003,[4] and set up the Mobile Robotics Group where he developed partnerships with BAE Systems and Nissan.[9] In 2005, he was appointed to a University Lectureship in Information Engineering and elected a fellow of New College Oxford where he was a Tutorial Fellow until 2012.[10] He became Professor of Engineering Science at New College, in 2010,[5] and BP Professor of Information Engineering and Fellow of Keble College in 2012.[10]
In 2010, Newman was awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship.[10] The flagship output was the “Robotcar”, which, in 2013, became the first autonomous vehicle permitted on public roads in the UK.[9] In 2014, Newman, with the newly developed technology and the Robotcar team, co-founded spin-out Oxbotica, later renamed to Oxa.[10][5][11]
He founded the Oxford Robotics Institute in 2016 and served as director until 2022.[12]
Honours, advisory roles and fellowships
Newman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the IEEE in 2014, both with citations for "outstanding contributions to robot navigation".[4]
He served on the UK Government’s Department for Transport Scientific Advisory Council from 2016 to 2020.[4]
From 2020 Newman has served as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.[5][12]
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to technology and engineering.[13]