CAPE Robotics Lab | University of Cape Town

(Coming Soon): We are establishing the group and actively looking for PhD students for the 2027 intake. View PhD opportunities →

Department of Computer Science · University of Cape Town

CAPE Robotics Lab is a new robotics research group being established in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town.

Our goal is to develop robots that learn physical skills for real-world impact, with applications in environmental sustainability. From e-waste recovery and recycling to repair and remanufacturing.

Apply for a PhD with Us Prospective Research Topics

Research Topics

Below are prospective topics that incoming students and researchers could work on:

Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) for Robotic Disassembly

Planning disassembly sequences for products whose condition, variant, or design is unknown in advance.

Deformable Linear Object Manipulation

Perceiving, untangling, and routing cables and wires, such as the cable bundles inside old computer cases.

Sim-to-Real Transfer & Synthetic Data for Robot Learning

Generative augmentation of robot demonstrations (e.g., NVIDIA Cosmos Transfer) to scale and diversify training data.

Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Online RL and fine-tuning so policies improve on real hardware: unscrewing, unclipping, and connector removal.

Semantic Reasoning & Long-Horizon Task Planning

Grounding vision-language models in robot actions with chain-of-thought, behaviour trees, and hierarchical planning.

Execution Monitoring & Failure Recovery

Perception-based detection of task success and failure for deployed VLA policies, triggering retries or replanning.

Metric 3D Perception for Manipulation

Learned depth and 3D scene understanding accurate at real-world scale. Disassembly needs millimetres, not centimetres.

Your Own Proposal

A complementary topic aligned with the lab’s research, such as tactile sensing, inspection, or human-robot collaboration.

Opportunities

Looking for PhD Students

We have funded PhD positions for the 2027 intake through the NRF Presidential PhD Programme (PPP) in Digital Transformation.

Funding: R200,000 per year for up to 3 years, plus equipment allowance, conference travel, and international mobility funding.
Eligibility: Master’s in CS, IS, or a related field with at least 65% (completed by Dec 2026), based full-time in Cape Town for the fellowship.
Key dates: Apply by 27 October 2026 (AoE). UCT CS parallel application by 1 November 2026.

View PhD Advert (PDF) Inquire via Email

* CAPE Robotics Lab selection is separate from UCT admissions and PPP funding decisions; endorsement does not guarantee admission or funding. Institutional criteria: sit.uct.ac.za/phd-and-post-doctoral-scholarships.