Author: miranda.addey

TAS community gathers for our first International Symposium

Posted on by miranda.addey

Over three days in July, just outside Edinburgh, researchers working on autonomous systems gathered for the first International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems at Heriot-Watt University. Although the TAS project has been running for a few years, the pandemic prevented the TAS Hub and nodes from gathering the community to share their research into trustworthiness and autonomous systems. The talks and panels consisted of a diverse range of engineers, computer scientists and social scientists, including plenaries by Professors Sharon Strover and Gina Neff.

 

Aerial view of symposium attendees in the main auditorium

Dr Stephanie Sheir and Matimba Swana enjoying the National Robotarium

TAS node in functionality team gather for the symposium

Dr Sabine Hauert presenting on Swarms

Our functionality node presented four posters and two papers, over the course of the conference. Dr Sabine Hauert didn’t let unreliable public transport prevent her from giving a talk on “Trustworthy Swarms”, a collaboration of researchers across our node. We also presented a scoping review, with work from Dr Helen Smith, Dr Jonathan Ives, and our previous colleague Dr Ariana Manzini, on “Ethics of trust/worthiness in Autonomous Systems”.

 

PhD student Matimba Swana

PhD student Suet Lee

Dr Abdul Manan Khan

Dr Chris Bennett

The first day of the conference focussed on early career researchers, and a number of Early Career Researcher awards were presented to them at the nearby National Robotarium, in categories including Policy and Knowledge Transfer. We were delighted that Dr Helen Smith won one of the awards for Responsible Research and Innovation, which included a £4,000 grant towards her research. We look forward to sharing where this leads.

 

The Early Career Researchers receive their awards

Dr Helen Smith receiving her award

The award was presented by Dr Elvira Perez Vallejos

She won in the category “Responsible Research and Innovation”

After we’d been joined by our international colleagues, the nodes then had a further day at the All Hands Meeting, to share what we’d done over the previous 12 months. We heard from every node, plans for UKRI’s new Responsible AI initiative, and one of the panels involved Professor Dame Wendy Hall.

Thank you to the organisers and everyone who came along to make it such a useful, interesting and friendly event.

All images credited to photographer Ryan Warburton.

Who’s the expert? “Reverse think tank” examines just that….

Posted on by miranda.addey

Matimba Swana, our TAS PhD student, joined other early career researchers in a “reverse think tank” project last year, organised by the Public Engagement team at University of Bristol and co-led by Kilter Theatre. Designed to be a creative approach to the new emphasis on responsible innovation, as well as encouraging debate about what that means, the reverse think tank challenges the notion of the “expert”. Eleven 15-18 year olds gathered to learn about current research which they then used in a collaborative storytelling activity, based on a Disney strategy they employed to think of new ideas for films.

Although the researchers weren’t present, the young people saw videos of Matimba’s SWARM study research, to get an idea of where the research might lead. She is looking at the ethics and regulations of nanoswarms, a future nanotechnology that could be developed to treat cancer, to help shape the first in-person clinical studies. The young people were excited about the possibility of the technology being used but were concerned about negative consequences such as autonomy and unknown long-term effects. Their story involved a man named Ralph, living in Bristol, in his early 50s. He’s wondering whether to get nanoswarm treatment for cancer, asks for advice from his wife, who is very distrustful of the medical establishment, and is “anti-vaxx” and his friend Bob, who believes this is Ralph’s chance to be immortal. This also highlighted the possible inequalities that could arise from nanoswarm use, and the general distrust of medical advances.

Matimba found the think tank outcomes really useful and says “Something that resonated with me was we conduct research that impacts the future of young people and yet their voices are often not included in this area of research. Engaging young people as peer reviewers of my research has been enriching and a chance to understand their thoughts and feelings about the technologies we are investigating that could impact their future.”

You can read more about it here

If you’d like to participate in our SWARM study focus groups, please go here.

Researchers and industry try their hand at swarm and soft robotics

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TAS Functionality Node invited developers, operators, end users and researchers to attend two masterclasses in April and May, taking place at Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Participants heard about the TAS Node project, its recent outputs and the test cases in swarm, soft and aerial robotics- and how these autonomous systems may be deployed in logistics, manufacturing and infrastructure industries. They then explored the capabilities of these technologies in soft and swarm robotics via an interactive ‘teaching and doing’ format. One participant Peta Masters, from King’s College, London thanked us for delivering “a terrific masterclass last Thursday and for showing us around the robotics lab, which I thought was just fabulous. What an exciting place to work. Really inspiring.”

In the swarm workshop the participants got to programme a swarm of robots and see their simulation enacted.

Participants were split into 3 teams, each responsible for programming one of the robots in the swarm. The objective was to get the robots to pick up a carrier without bumping into obstacles. Each team started by simulating programming their robot’s behaviour and testing it out through simulations. Then they got to transfer the code to the robots and see their algorithm plays out in real life.

In the soft robotics workshop, participants tried two different demos to show how easy it is to build a soft robot but how complex it is to control.

In the first demo, they built a soft continuous manipulator with a polythene roll they had to cut and hermetically seal. The manipulator was then inflated through a compressor, and participants had to figure out how to control it to bring down objects in specific positions without touching other things simultaneously. Due to their nature, soft robots have theoretically infinite degrees of freedom. The idea was to move it through cables, but the problems they had to solve were: Where are the best places to stick cables? How many cables do we need? In addition, cables needed to be guided along the structure; how much room do we have to leave between each guide? They experimented with how the behaviour of soft manipulators can change dramatically, only changing these aspects.

The second demo was about soft grippers and modularity. As we said before, soft robot control can be very complex, so if we divide the problem into smaller problems, would it be easier to control a soft robot? This is the thinking behind a modular soft gripper. Participants were asked to assemble a soft gripper joining together different pieces..

Lastly everyone learned more about cobotics (collaborative robots) by using the soft gripper they assembled with a traditional gripper mounted on the robotic arm UR10. In this collaborative simulation, one person had to operate the soft gripper, another the robotic arm, and another the hard gripper.

Thanks to everyone who came to try out our masterclass!

Robots unite! Somerset families swarm to play our robot game

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How do natural swarms interact and how can we use that to our benefit in robotics? Visitors to the first ever Somerscience, which took place in Bruton on the May Day bank holiday, found out the answers to these questions and more and became robot swarms themselves in our special TAS swarm game. Neshika, Suet, Razanne, Fern and Matimba from our swarm team gave an insight into their research, whilst guiding the visitors of all ages to their spot on the leaderboard. In small teams the human ‘robots’ and their controller were asked to move all the boxes to the landing zone- and figure out the rules for moving the different types of boxes as they went along. The team also showed videos of the swarm robots and posters detailing their work. Later our very own Sabine took to the stage to answer questions for a special edition of I’m a Scientist, Get me out of here. By the end of the day we had a winning time of 1 minute 45 seconds– and our demonstrators really enjoyed talking to interested and enthusiastic members of the public. 

Thanks to all the organisers and visitors on the day- if you’d like a robot swarm to descend on your event, do get in touch.

TAS researchers head to a school in Somerset for an IET Faraday Challenge day

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TAS Functionality node researchers are heading to a school in Somerset to help students with the Faraday Challenge. The Faraday Challenge is an initiative from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and TAS Hub has organised for researchers from every one of the seven nodes to visit schools across the country. The Faraday Challenge Days gives students, aged 12-13 years old, the opportunity to research, design and make solutions to genuinely tough engineering problems. They have to plan, develop and present their solution, and complete an apprenticeship task related to the main challenge. The winners of the main event will be awarded a prize for each team member and a trophy for their school. The top teams from across the UK will be invited to showcase their ideas at an event in June.

Dr Razanne Abu-Aisheh and Dr Peter Winter will visit Norton Hill School, in Midsomer Norton, on Tuesday 25th April, and support two of the competing groups. At the end of the day the students will be given an interactive engineering demo for the school to keep. Check our twitter on the day for more updates!

Swarm Robotics heads to a field in Somerset for Somerscience

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 We’re really excited to bring the team to Bruton for the 2023 edition of its Somerscience festival. Taking place on Monday 1st May, it’s a free event across the town with an exciting line-up of talks, workshops, shows and hands-on sessions. Running from 10am to 6pm it’s family-friendly and well connected to the region by transport. Our swarm team are looking forward to bringing swarm robotics to a muddy field in Somerset: do join us!

Our team, a mixture of researchers and PhD students, all have one thing in common: their love for swarm robotics. Join them as they introduce you to a game where you get to be the robot swarm. Explore how we’re using swarm behaviour to introduce a new way of using robots, as you get to have a go yourself. Talk to the team themselves to hear about their research and how its involved in health and other applications. There’s a lot to see and do throughout the day. No need to book but for more information, including a programme, please visit their website. Follow us on twitter for updates.

Photo of the DOTS robots moving boxes in swarm arena at Bristol Robotics Laboratory

Robot Hackathon

Posted on by miranda.addey

In June this year the universities of York, Manchester and Sheffield hosted a hackathon – a competition designed to collaboratively solve a problem in a particular field. The competing teams were a mix of undergraduates, postgraduates and post-doctoral researchers. The goal of the competition was to produce some code that would allow a single operator to control a group of 5 robots. The TAS functionality node was represented at the event by Dr Sabine Hauert and Dr James Wilson.

Over the three days attendees heard from an expert panel discussing key challenges around swarm robotics, which included Dr Hauert, and helped develop solutions for remotely operating robot swarms, using Pi-puck and MONA robots.  On the final day teams made presentations, with prizes for the best solutions.

The competition involved the robots moving around a small arena and gathering in locations (generated virtually) to score points. The locations themselves were labelled from 1-5, which was the amount of robots you needed gathered there in order to gain points. Most of the devised solutions involved control over a single agent with others following along autonomously, though some groups put together fully autonomous solutions. Some groups were even able to run code on swarms remotely at other universities which was fun!

Thanks to the universities, organisers, hosts and speakers for a brilliant time.

 

 

Autonomous vehicle testing using game engines

Posted on by miranda.addey

We’re excited to announce the recent publication by some members of our team, Professor Kerstin Eder and Dr Greg Chance of the Trustworthy Systems Laboratory (https://www.bristol.ac.uk/tsl), of research into the determinism of game engines used for simulation-based autonomous vehicle verification. These simulations are useful in developing control systems and test environments for the vehicles; but only if they behave deterministically, and therefore yield reliable and repeatable results. Unfortunately, this isn’t a characteristic of game engines and they often produce different outcomes for the same initial conditions. The paper, published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, presents the causes and effects of this non-deterministic behaviour, and sets forth a case study showing the shortcomings of a particular simulator, and a methodology to assess and minimize simulation precision. To read the paper please go here:  On Determinism of Game Engines Used for Simulation-Based Autonomous Vehicle Verification