Skip to main content
Overview
Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor in the Department of Computer Science+44 (0) 191 33 41720

Biography

Farshad Arvin is a Professor of Robotics in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University.

He received his BSc degree in Computer Engineering in 2004, an MSc degree in Computer Systems Engineering in 2010, and a PhD in Computer Science in 2015.

Background

Before joining Durham in 2022, Farshad was a Lecturer in Robotics (2018-2021) and a Senior Lecturer in Robotics (2021-2022) in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at The University of Manchester.

He joined the University of Manchester in 2015 as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Robotics for Extreme Environments group at the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering. He was a Research Assistant at the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS) at the University of Lincoln, UK (2012 to 2015). He was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship for being involved in the FP7-EYE2E and LIVCODE EU projects during his PhD study.

Experience

Farshad's research interests include Biohybrid Robotics, Bio-inspired Swarm Robotics, and Autonomous Multi-agent Systems.

He visited several leading institutes, including Artificial Life Laboratory in Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria, in 2018; the Italian Institute of Technology (iit) in Genoa, Italy, in 2017; Institute of Rehabilitation and Medical Robotics in Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in 2014; and the Institute of Microelectronics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 2013 and 2012. 

Research Team and Projects

Farshad is the founding director of Swarm & Computation Intelligence Laboratory (SwaCIL), formed in 2018. The lab hosts 4 Post-Doctoral Research Associates, an Electronics technician and 6 PGR students. It has received more than £4M in direct funding from the EU, EPSRC, InnovateUK and industry. Farshad coordinates several research projects, including a large EU project H2020-FET RoboRoyale (2021-2026, €3.27M), PI in Horizon Europe Pathfiner Sensorbees (2024-2029, €3.2M), PI in Horizon Europe  BioDiMoBot (2025-2030, €8M) and H2020-FET Robocoenosis (2020-2025, €3M).

Research interests

  • Swarm Robotics
  • Bio-inspired Swarms
  • Multi-agent Systems
  • Bio-hybrid Systems

Publications

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Journal Article

Supervision students