collaborations

Last Friday 22nd January 2016, Professor Sethu Vijayakumar, Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Personal Chair in Robotics in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, concluded a contract signing with Honda Research Institute Europe, in the Informatics Forum’s Turing Room. This marks the beginning of a fruitful collaboration in the domain of interactive robotics between the Centre and Honda RI, the home of the world famous ASIMO humanoid. Professor Vijayakumar said:

On 1st December 2015, Professor Sethu Vijayakumar, Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics Professor of Robotics in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, concluded a contract signing with Hitachi's Central Research Labs (CRL-CER) in Tokyo, with support from UKTI and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This marks the beginning of an exciting collaboration in the domain of intelligent warehousing and autonomous manipulation robots between the School of Informatics and one of the leading manufacturing giants of Japan.

On Friday 23rd October 2015, the first Edinburgh Centre for Robotics took place in the James Watt Centre II at Heriot-Watt University. Industrial delegates, academic staff and students (CDT & aligned) attended the event. Professor Peter Corke, from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, opened the Conference with his talk “Why Robots See?”, which highlighted the similarities and differences between human and robot visions, as well as pondered on the future of Robotics in relation to recent advances in Computer Vision.

In collaboration with the University of Glasgow, Prof Oliver Lemon, from The Interaction Lab at Heriot-Watt University, and part of the ECR Robotarium facilities, has been awarded Horizon 2020 funding for their proposal “MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot” (MuMMER). This is a follow-on of their work on socially intelligent robot communication in the FP7 JAMES project. It brings 900K euros over 4 years to the Interaction Lab.

Dr Patricia Vargas, Outreach and Public Engagment lead at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, has just secured funding from The Royal Society-Newton International Exchanges (Newton Fund) Scheme.

This will support her work which is in collaboration with the Brazilian Neuroscience Institute .

Congratulations Patricia!