Dr Simon Watson's research interests are in the field of mobile robots for hazardous and extreme environments. The primary applications for this research are nuclear decommissioning and offshore renewable energy facilities. He has experience developing aquatic (surface and subsurface), aerial and ground robots and a number of the robots he has helped develop have been successfully deployed into radioactive facilities on the Sellafield site including the AVEXIS(TM) underwater robot, the CARMA wheeled robot and the MIRRAX reconfigurable snake robot.

Dr Watson teaches in Electronics and in Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems at the University of Manchester, UK, and has published extensively in these areas. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.