Robotarium

The morning of monday 29th February 2016, Valkyrie, NASA's R5 Robot, arrived in the School of Informatics. The Edinburgh Centre for Robotics Valkyrie team, Professor Vijayakumar, Dr Fallon, Dr Vladimir Ivan, and PhD students Wolfgang Merkt, Marco Caravagna, Simona Nobili and Yiming Yang welcomed the NASA crew and set up the lab for the new addition to the Robotarium East. The Valkyrie is not ready for display and demos yet, but further information will be provided soon.

Last Wednesday 24th February, Professor Sethu Vijayakumar and PhD students, Alexander Enoch (Edinburgh) and Iris Kyranou (Heriot Watt) were live on BBC micro:bit Live Lesson at 11-11.45am . Professor Sethu Vijayakumar gave an insight of the Valkyrie robot that arrived in Edinburgh last Monday 29th February 2016. Alexander Enoch and Iris Kyranou demoed some of the robots that are part of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics Robotarium East, such as the prosthetic hand.

At the end of last week a large wooden crate arrived at the Robotics Lab at Heriot-Watt University.  Since then our team has been busy unpacking and assembling our latest piece of equipment.  We are now delighted to share images of the FLASH robot, the latest addition to the Robotics Lab. His unique, mechanoidal appearance allows him to avoid the uncanny valley phenomenon and use gestures, face and the whole body to efficiently express emotions.

Useful Links

Robotics Lab

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (Robotarium East) has been successful with a Horizon 2020 research proposal, called TrimBot2020. The project will research the underlying robotics and vision technologies and prototype the first outdoor garden trimming robot. The robot will navigate over varying terrain, approach rose bushes, hedges and boxwood topiary, to trim them to an ideal shape.

"Robots that can understand human emotions are being brought into Scottish schools to help with teaching. It’s hoped the machines will be used to assist in subjects such as history or geography – and because they can sense when children are bored, frustrated or unhappy, they’ll be able to adapt their teaching methods in a simpler way to a human tutor."

Two Heriot-Watt researchers, Amol Deshmukh and Dr. Srini Janarthanam from the department of Computer Science, recently took two robots into Beeslack Community High School in Penicuik. The researchers, led by Professor Ruth Aylett and Dr Helen Hastie, are part of a large European project EMOTE (www.emote-project.eu), which also has partners in Sweden, Germany and Portugal. The team have been creating a learning environment that includes a socially aware robotic tutor and a large touch table.

On 2nd September 2015, Sky News correspondent James Matthewson visited the Robotarium facilities at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. ‘Jazz’, ‘BLUE’, ‘The Castle’, a Prosthetic Hand, and other robots featured each hour from 9:30, as part of the Robot Revolution week at Sky News.

All six videos from the coverage can be found in our channel's YouTube playlist.

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.

We are delighted to publish the first edition of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics Newsletter.  We hope you enjoy finding out about what we do at the Centre. We'll publish the ECR newsletter bi-monthly so keep an eye out for our next newsletter in August. 

Useful links

Edinburgh Centre for Robotics

Robotarium

On Monday 18th May, Professor Nick Taylor escorted a delegation from the Economic and Commercial Office of the Chinese Embassy led by its Head, Minister Counsellor Jin Xu, on a tour of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics at Heriot-Watt University. They were accompanied by Ruth Moir, Heriot-Watt’s Assistant Principal (International Development) and James Brodie of the China Britain Business Council.