Trustworthy Human-AV collaboration for nuclear transportation

About the Project

About the studentship

Reference

2627-OCT-CATE21

Closing date for applications

3 June 2026

Start date

1 October 2026

Transportation of nuclear material at Sellafield Ltd faces a critical scalability challenge, requiring operations to increase from monthly to daily while maintaining safety standards. Sellafield’s successful deployment of their first autonomous heavy goods vehicle (HGV) proved technical feasibility in nuclear environments, but current operations require multiple safety operators (acting remotely or in-vehicle), making them unsuitable for scaling-up. The fundamental bottleneck for existing systems is inappropriate levels of trust between operators and autonomous systems; operators may either under-trust or over-trust.

This PhD will aim to develop comprehensive trust models for human-autonomous vehicle (AV) collaboration and then create adaptive systems that calibrate operator trust appropriately while enabling operator confidence in the autonomous decision-making and reduce cognitive workload.

This will enable single operators to supervise multiple AVs simultaneously. The research will use and adapt Sellafield’s existing proof of concept and collaborate with Digital Concepts Engineering Ltd (DCE) to create and test various human machine interface designs that optimize operator confidence and decision-making effectiveness rather than developing entirely new platforms.

This research will support the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s (NDA) long-term decommissioning mission while developing transferable expertise in autonomous system supervision across safety-critical nuclear environments.

This PhD includes a six-month secondment at Sellafield Ltd with the Special Nuclear Material (SNM) Innovation Team which will provide direct operational access to facilitate understanding of nuclear facility day-to-day operations. This will ensure that the research remains grounded in the nuclear environment realities while building essential industry relationships.

If you have any questions about the studentship, please email Dr Amina Hamoud at amina.hamoud@uwe.ac.uk.