Contact Dr Sarah Fletcher
- Tel: +44 (0) 1234 758234
- Email: s.fletcher@cranfield.ac.uk
- Twitter:
Areas of expertise
- Aerospace Manufacturing
- Human Factors
- Industrial Ergonomics and Human Factors
- Manufacturing Systems
Background
Sarah leads the Industrial Psychology and Human Factors (IPHF) group in the Centre for Structures, Assembly and Intelligent Automation which works to enhance the safe and effective integration of people in new processes and with new technologies. She has been conducting human-systems research at Cranfield for over 24 years, leading the human analysis work on many UK and EU projects in the manufacturing sector as well as defence, automotive and transport. Sarah teaches and supervises at Masters and Doctoral level and has developed new modules for Cranfield's MSc in Robotics and MSc in Applied Artificial Intelligence courses. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the Chartered Institute of Human Factors and the Women's Engineering Society, and an active participant in a number of ISO and BSI standards committees involving robotics and ergonomics.
Research opportunities
Sarah's research focuses primarily on studying the psychological and social aspects of human-system / human-robot interaction in industrial / work settings. In particular, her work explores how people respond to, and work with, intelligent and digital technologies and to develop solutions that will promote their safety, acceptance, satisfaction and performance. She has worked towards the development of mixed methods that provide more comprehensive and reliable human analysis, combining traditional subjective and psychometric techniques with novel sensor-based physiological measurement tools.
Current activities
Current research activities include leading the human analysis work across five EC Horizon Europe projects - AI-PRISM, CONVERGING, FEROX, JARVIS and MASTERLY - and in the UK's Made Smarter Innovation Research Centre for Smart, Collaborative Industrial Robotics, also known as the Smart Cobotics Centre.
She is also actively involved in the development of national and international standards for robotics, industrial safety, and ergonomics of human-system interaction. This work has included contributing to the development of the world's first standard for ethical design and application of robots (BS 8611:2016) and running a national survey to capture public opinions and acceptance of robots in everyday settings: BSI/Cranfield robot survey
Clients
Airbus
BAE Systems
Ford
Meggitt
Rolls-Royce
