• Question: What are your thoughts on the that your past, current and future work is helping further the fields of knowledge on the subjects of robotics and science that were undeveloped or other wise completely unexplored before hand?

    Asked by ThySociallyAwkwardOne to Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 10 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Siobhan Duncan

      Siobhan Duncan answered on 10 Mar 2017:

      This is a really good question, I hope I will be able to answer it for you.

      I am very new to research, so my past work includes work I did for my undergraduate degree. Non of that really advanced science or robotics, but it allowed me to learn.

      At the moment, I’m working with swarm robots. This is relatively under-explored because it involves using so many robots which is not cheap, easy or even sometimes possible.

      But there is over 30 years of work from other robot researchers.

      I’m hoping that my work at the moment will help improve the way swarm robots communicate with each other. There hasn’t been too much work on emulating the way insects speak to one an other, but using human technologies. For example ants lay chemicals, however rather than designing robots that lay chemicals, we can use the basic principle and use current technology like Bluetooth, WiFi, Light, RFID, etc…

      One of the nice effects of my line of work, is that if we can create robots that are able to act like insects, biologists can use them to try out theories or run experiments. There is a robot called a Kilobot which is used by biologists to test theories about how cells co-operate for example.

      I’m hoping in the future my work will allow us to send swarms of robots into space to mine, explore and build on other planets 🙂

      Hope this answers your question
      Siobhan

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 10 Mar 2017:

      My field – personal/domestic social robotics is very young compared to some other fields – it’s only about 20 years old (compare that to maths which is thousands of years old). It’s only very recently that companies started to develop good enough robots that I can give to people for months and not worry that they will break or malfunction.

      So, judging by what others did before me, and by what companies now produce – we need a lot more research in my field, and I try my best to advance it.

      I expect that more socially intelligent robots for homes will come to market, and we’ll want to learn as much as we can about them, and about how we like them to be.

      It’s an exciting time for social domestic robots! You can check out my personal picks:

      Jibo by Jibo Inc. (https://www.jibo.com);
      Buddy by Blue Frog Robotics (http://www.bluefrogrobotics.com/en/buddy/);
      Pepper by SoftBank and Aldebaran Robotics (https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/cool-robots/pepper);
      and Olly by Emotech Inc. (https://www.heyolly.com/index.html#product)

    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 10 Mar 2017:

      I think my work is helping the field of robotics quite a lot, and not only robotics. I am working on projects in healthcare and education, which use robotics.

      For example, the healthcare project I worked on, to my knowledge, was the first one of that kind. We had a humanoid robot interacting with a robotic wheelchair and being able to drive it around. Also, the robot was able to detect if someone has fallen, verify if it is actually a human, and call for help when needed.

      So I would like to think that I have made quite a huge contribution to healthcare in that sense.

      For the education, I hope to be able to bring robots to schools, and I am currently in the planning stage and negotiating with a company from the USA. We are planning to start doing some data collection soon to see how students will interact with robots.

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