Kathryn Daltorio
Amphibious Crab-like Walking Robots
Crabs seem to be able to walk anywhere. Migrating through waves. Climbing slippery rocks. Thriving in sand. Unlike most robot end-effectors, each foot is curved and pointy but when used together the legs can grasp the ground, providing stability at lighter weights. This enables our robots to walk out of the waves onto dry sand. But the legs can be even more multifunctional: they can be used to probe for buried objects and manipulate objects heavier than themselves. With hand-to-hexapod interfaces, we are exploring the extent to which a crab robot can act like a human hand in new applications, for example infrastructure inspection and remediation of explosive hazards. Our applied biorobotics lab is asking new questions to pull inspiration from biology into solving new problems.
Bio: Kathryn Daltorio is a Case Western Reserve University Associate Professor from Ohio, USA. She has won NSF CAREER award, ONR Young Investigator award, and best paper awards including Best Technical Paper at CLAWAR 2024. She has studied the locomotion of earthworms, decision-making in cockroaches, and climbing in geckos and insects. Her robots won autonomous lawn mowing competitions, were the first to climb vertically with gecko-inspired adhesives on simple feet, and provided platforms for testing hypotheses about animal locomotion and neurobiologically-inspired control. She and her students design, control and analyze a range of robotic prototypes to test neurobiologically-inspired control networks.
Professor Phil Webb FIET
Collaborative robots in industry – where are they leading us?
In the 1960s an essentially human free factory was the assumption for the future. However, despite the hype this goal has never been met and is unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. The history of industrial robotics is littered with technology disappointments, and the realisation of how hard some things are to do with robotics. In more recent years the idea of collaborative robotics has gained traction where industrial, and indeed domestic tasks, are completed by a human and a robot working together. The question is how far will this go and what will be the reaction of society to ever greater levels of robot intrusion and ubiquity? This lecture tries to encapsulate over 30 years of work and personal thinking around industrial and large-scale collaborative robotics? Is it just hype or have we reached a true turning point?
Bio: Professor Phil Webb is the Head of the Centre for Robotics and Assembly at Cranfield University and holds the Royal Academy of Engineering and Airbus Chair in Industrial Robotics and Assembly.
He has over 30 years of experience of research and teaching in advanced industrial robotics and has published widely on the subject. Amongst other roles he has served as a member of the Council of the British Automation and Robot Association and as the UK representative to the International Federation for Robotics. He is a member of the SAE Automated Assembly and Fastening Committee and in 2022 he was awarded the SAE Speller Award for services to Automated Fastening and Assembly in the Aerospace Industry. In 2024 his team at Cranfield were awarded the ATI Innovation award along with Adaptix Ltd for collaborative work on robotic X-ray inspection.
He currently leads a successful research group at Cranfield with a particular focus on large scale human robot interaction and in his role as an Airbus Professor he sits between academia and industry.
Professor Nick Hawes
Better Autonomy Through Uncertainty
Due to the challenges of perception and action, and inevitable inaccuracies in world modelling, the results of a robot’s interactions with its environment are inherently stochastic. To successfully complete extended missions under such conditions it is therefore essential that autonomous robots use techniques from decision-making under uncertainty to plan goal-directed behaviour. In this talk I will give an overview of our recent work on planning under uncertainty for autonomous robots, drawing examples from mobile service robots, underwater vehicles, and quadrupeds.
Bio: Nick Hawes is a Professor of AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He directs the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI), a federation of eight research groups spanning the breadth of robotics research. He is also a Tutorial Fellow at Pembroke College. Within the ORI he leads the Goal-Oriented Autonomous Long-Lived Systems (GOALS) group which performs research into sequential decision-making for autonomous systems, including robots and heterogenous multi-agent teams. He has led a number of world-first deployments of AI-controlled robots in the real world, including long-term autonomous mobile robots in care and security, quadrupeds exploring and inspecting active nuclear sites, and AUVs gathering data on underwater ecosystems. He is a member of DSIT’s Robotics Advisory Group, an Associate Editor of the Journal of AI Research, and Chief Scientist of Stateful Robotics.