About the project
This PhD project is about pushing the boundaries in manufacturing, and making lasers become autonomous decision-makers, guiding us into a future of faster, cleaner, and more precise production processes.
This project stands to reshape industries and make next-generation manufacturing truly intelligent.
In the ever-evolving landscape of advanced manufacturing, lasers have emerged as one of the most powerful and versatile tools. But imagine a world where these lasers are not just precise instruments, but intelligent systems capable of optimising their own processes in real-time.
This is the ambitious vision behind this PhD opportunity — a project that aims to fuse the cutting-edge fields of artificial intelligence and laser technology to revolutionise how we manufacture everything from medical devices to aerospace components.
At the heart of this research is the concept of smart lasers: lasers equipped with AI-powered control systems that can learn, adapt, and self-optimise based on real-time data. Traditional laser manufacturing processes, though precise, are often static, requiring constant human intervention and pre-programming to handle variations in materials, environmental conditions, or desired outcomes.
This project seeks to change that by integrating deep learning algorithms that will empower lasers to "think" for themselves. Imagine a laser that can automatically adjust its power, focus, or beam profile in response to live feedback, and therefore ensure the highest level of accuracy and efficiency at all times.
The potential applications are vast. In high-precision industries like aerospace, electronics, and medical manufacturing, even the slightest deviation can lead to costly errors or waste. This is particularly true for ultrashort pulsed lasers, which can achieve sub-micron-scale manufacturing but are highly sensitive to small fluctuations in the material or laser parameters. With smart lasers, manufacturers will not only enhance quality control but also unlock new levels of autonomous production, reducing waste, energy consumption, and overall costs. These intelligent systems could continuously monitor every facet of the manufacturing process, for example temperature, material properties, and beam dynamics, and optimise these in real time to guarantee perfect results.
The technical core of the project will focus on automating laser-based manufacturing processes, collecting massive amounts of data, and training state-of-the-art neural networks, to unlock new paradigms in advanced manufacturing. These models will be trained to predict the optimal processing parameters for any given scenario, learning from past performance to make future operations more efficient, using combinations of supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning techniques. The ultimate goal is to create a closed-loop system where the laser can independently evolve its operations over time.
