UK Robotics Hot Spots

A recent report, commissioned by the HSBC Commercial Bank, predicts that six UK regions will become Robotics hubs in the future business landscape of the UK: Birmingham, Edinburgh, Essex, London, Manchester and Plymouth.

Birmingham has a respectable position in the robotics field, with names like Kuka Automation and Robotics, based in Halesowen. The School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham has an established and growing international reputation for research and teaching in Computer Science, AI and robotics. The School has nearly 90 active researchers and the robotics research group conducts research in a number of sub-fields of intelligent robotics and related areas such as statistical machine learning.

The Institute of Perception, Action, and Behaviour at the University of Edinburgh is focused on activities related to how to link, in theory and in practice, computational perception, representation, transformation and generation processes to external worlds.

The Essex Robotics group is one of the large mobile robotics groups in the UK.Robotics research at the University of Essex focuses on autonomous mobile robotics, and addresses a wide range of research questions.with advanced mobile robotics research facilities such as the Essex Robotics Arena featuring the world's largest powered floor and a real-time 3D VICON motion tracking system.

The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College in London is leading in research into medical robotics for neurosurgery.

The University of Plymouth was the first to provide an undergraduate degree in Robotics and Automated Systems in 1992. The University now offers degree courses at BSc, BEng, MEng and MSc level in Robotics supported by an active research group. The key research strands include human robot interfaces, natural language communication, cognition and reasoning and visual and haptic interfaces.

Social Robot Research

Neighborhood Networks is a long-term research project that combines community arts, participatory design, informal learning, and engineering to articulate and discover how communities use emerging technologies, specifically robotics. Through interviews, participant observation, generative workshops, and participatory design, the Neighborhood Networks project focuses on working with neighborhood groups that are organized for local representation and collective action. Our interest is how these neighborhood groups use or might use emerging technologies as a means to publicly address their concerns.

The Neighborhood Networks project is directed by Carl DiSalvo at The Georgia Institute of Technology and Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon University.

The University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE) is partner in the Neighborhood Networks program, providing guidance and support in the community outreach, program development, and evaluation. The project is funded by a generous grant from Intel Research.

Human Robot Interaction Survey

As integral survey in WP3 "Robotic- CWE interfaces and evaluation of impacts" of the FP6 project ROBOT@CWE http://www.robot-at-cwe.eu/ is publishing an online questionnaire. The purpose of this survey is to gain first valuable insights on how humanoid robots are experienced.

The survey is also a part of my thesis entitled "Validation of an Evaluation Framework for Human-Robot Interaction. The impact of Usability, Social Acceptance, User Experience and Societal Impact on Collaboration with humanoid Robots".
To participate please click on the according link below or copy it into your web browser.
English Survey: http://icts.uni-salzburg.at/survey_new/surveyadds/en/
French Survey: http://icts.uni-salzburg.at/survey_new/surveyadds/fr/
Spanish Survey: http://icts.uni-salzburg.at/survey_new/surveyadds/esp/
German Survey: http://icts.uni-salzburg.at/survey_new/surveyadds/ger/