Month: July 2021

BRL On Demand

Posted on by nicwoodhall

The Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) hosted their first virtual conference on 30 June 2021. With over 50 talks, the conference was a gathering of top robotics researchers, business leaders and PhD/post-doctoral students showcasing cutting-edge research.

Members of the TAS Functionality Node gave talks on Connected Autonomous Vehicles (Prof Kerstin Eder), Out-of-the-Box Swarm Solutions for Intralogistics (Associate Prof. Sabine Hauert) and Developing Trustworthy Adaptive Autonomous Systems (Dr Shane Windsor). Sabine Hauert also joined a panel discussion: What Is The Future of Robotics?

Other speakers covered a wide range of topics such as unmanned aerial vehicles, soft robotics, assistive technologies, human-robot interaction and robot safety and ethics.

If you missed the conference, or you would like to re-watch it, BRL has made all the talks available through their dedicated YouTube channel.

 

Powering emergency food distribution using swarms: Results from the DOTS competition are in

Posted on by nicwoodhall

Find out how robots called DOTS (Distributed Organisation and Transport Systems) were used to help simulate the distribution of emergency food parcels in a competition run jointly by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Toshiba Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory and the South Gloucestershire Council’s UMBRELLA project.

Increases in the number of emergency food parcels distributed by food banks have accelerated over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, particularly in those going to children. Robot swarms could help streamline the distribution of these emergency food parcels, while freeing up time for volunteers and workers to interface with the users and provide human contact.

Read about how participants in the competition brainstormed and engineered solutions to tackle the challenge and watch their simulations on the RoboHub website.