Profile

I’m a 25 year old PhD student in Edinburgh. I live with my sister Kirsty, who is master’s student in Computer Science. I have also have a younger brother, Scott, who studies Computer Science in Glasgow. We’re are a pretty technology mad family.

I live with my two cats. Our wee tomcat Haydn who is a fiercely independent panther-cat who we named after Hedy Lammar who was a famous engineer and film star. Hedy helped engineer frequency-hopping, spread-spectrum technology which laid the ground work for WiFi today. Our other cat, Emilia who is a soft lap cat who loves to climb doors and she is named after Émilie du Châtelet a famous French physicist who contributed massively to a branch of physics known as Newtonian mechanics used heavily by engineers.

I’m originally from an island off the north west coast of Scotland called the Isle of Lewis. It’s pretty lovely there, quiet, clean, beautiful and very very windy 😀 Many people from home speak Gaelic, or Gàidhlig, although I only know a few phrases and our island has been voted the best in Europe. More on my hometown.

I became interested in Robotics because it’s cool, it’s a lot of fun and it’s a career that allows you to play with cool gadgets and toys all day.

I initially fell in love with the idea of building robots by watching lots of movies with robots as a kid. Star wars, Robot and Frank, iRobot, Wall-e, Bicentennial Man, Artificial Intelligence, Chappie, 2001: A space odyssey, etc…

I dream about a world where people don’t have to do boring, repetitive tasks and can spend their time learning, taking part in sports, playing games, or what ever they wish to do 🙂 We could also use robots to clean up the planet, save people from dangerous situations and send them further and further into space to see what is out there.

One of my favourite things to do when I’m not working, is to binge watching tv shows. The highlights include Rick and Morty, Archer, BoJack Horseman and StarGate SG1.

I’m very passionate about getting more young women and girls interested in Robotics and technology in general. I also love to speak to people about what robots are, why they are a great thing and why we don’t need to fear a real life terminator.

I have written about why I think we need more women in Robotics for our student blog.

My work involves researching how we can design robots that can collaborate with thousands (or even millions) of others identical robots to complete a common goal.

This common goal could be to search for a person after a disaster, explore a new planet or build homes/bridges/etc… so that people don’t have to.

This idea is inspired by the way that social insects behave, like ants, bees, termites, etc…

Very simple insects are capable of working as a team to build huge structures, carry food far bigger than any one insect, create bridges out of themselves, or even communicate using dance.

The science behind this is know an swarm intelligence, which is a branch Artificial Intelligence. How can we design and build complex intelligent robot swarms made of very simple robots that aren’t very smart as an individual.

Don’t hesitate to ask me more questions about my work!

I would use the money to pay for materials to build a small robot swarm using an open source design. This could be modified to make the robots simpler to use and to add things like flashing lights etc.. to make them look cooler.

This would allow me to take these robots with me when I do my outreach work. At the moment I borrow one robot from the centre and I have a small robotic arm which I own.

However a cheap swarm would allow me to better communicate my work to the public. It would also allow children, young people and adults access to a real swarm which they can program and learn about swarms intelligence and robotics.

Ideally I would have a demo mode used for showing them off and a demo program that children could modify to observe how simple changes can have significant effects on global behaviours of the swarm.

In addition, individual robots from a swarm can be used for outreach and kids can modify the code to allow the robot to avoid obstacles or perform a certain pre-programmed movement, etc…

One potential open source platform is the Colias Robot Image

An other is the Droplets platform. More here…