Dr. Boyle, J. H.

Jordan Boyle is an Assistant Professor with the Materializing Futures (MF) section, Department of Sustainable Design Engineering (SDE) of the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE). His current research direction is Human-Centric Swarm Robotics, which focusses on the development of swarm robotics systems that are designed to work with or alongside humans in a safe and effective manner. In particular, he is interested in applying swarm approaches to the co-design and fabrication of physical structures, and in studying human-robot interaction as it applies to swarms of relatively simple robots.

Academic Background

Jordan Boyle joined the Sustainable Design Engineering department in TU Delft's Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering as Assistant Professor in April 2022.

Prior to that, Jordan Boyle was a member of academic staff (first Lecturer then Associate Professor) in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds (UK) for 11 years. During that time his main research focus was mobile robotics for exploration of hard to access areas, though he maintained a number of other side projects.

Before becoming a member of academic staff at Leeds, Jordan Boyle spent about a year as a postdoc on an EU funded project that sought to develop mobile robots for operation in the human colon. Before that he had a one year independent fellowship funded by the EPSRC, during which he developed a biologically inspired worm robot based on his PhD research.

His PhD was supervised by Professor Netta Cohen in the School of Computing at Leeds, and was in the field of computational neuroscience. Specifically, he applied computational modelling (and data processing) to understand and replicate the neural control of locomotion in the nematode worm C. elegans.

Prior to that, Jordan Boyle did an MSc by research in the school of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), also in the field of computational neuroscience, which was preceded by an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at the same institution.