To be confirmed

To be confirmed

"Assessing and Addressing Ethical Risk from Anthropomorphism and Deception in Socially Assistive Robots"

by Katie Winkle, Praminda Caleb-Solly, Ute Leonards, Ailie Turton & Paul Bremner

View publication here

Late Breaking Report: 

"Predicting Human Interactivity State from Surrounding Social Signals"

by Youssef Mohamed & Séverin Lemaignan

View publication here

Late Breaking Report: 

"Framing the Challenge of Social Interaction Modelling: One Case Study"

by Nicola Webb, Youssef Mohamed &  Séverin Lemaignan

View publication here

Late Breaking Report: 

"Helper's High with a Robot Pet"

by Chatchai Chirapornchai, Paul Bremner & Joseph E. Daly

View publication here

The Road to a successful HRI: AI, Trust and ethicS (TRAITS) Workshop

This workshop aims to explore successful HRI from a multidisciplinary perspective to analyse the different aspects of HRI that impact its success. Particular focus are the AI algorithms required to implement autonomous interactions, and the factors that enhance, undermine, or recover humans' trust in robots. 

Finally, potential ethical and legal concerns, and how they can be addressed will be considered.

Organisers include Anouk Van Maris (BRL)

Further info here

R4L @HRI 2021

International experts in the field will share their knowledge concerning the design of social robot behaviours which support learning, their embedding in a learning activity and the evaluation of their impact through an experiment and the assessment of the person’s learning. 

The workshop is organized as a highly interactive event, in which participants are encouraged to bring case studies taken from their own research and discuss them in groups and with the experts.

Further info here

Safe and ethical priorities for AI

(10:00 - 11:00)

23 March 2021

How can the UK play a world-leading role in fostering and championing responsible innovation? Chaired by Adrian Weller, The Alan Turing Institute's Programme Director for Artificial Intelligence, this session will begin with fireside chat with Adrian and Tabitha Goldstaub, Chair of the UK AI Council, followed by Nathan Lepora demonstrating intelligent tactile robot hands, and Joanna Bryson discussing improvements to the governance and ethics of digital technology.

Panelists include Prof. Nathan Lepora (BRL)

Further info here

"An all soft, electro-pneumatic controller forsoft robots."

Garrad M., Feeney I., Conn A., Rossiter J., Nemitz M. & Hauser H. 

"Free Tendons for Travelling Wave generation in Elastomer Membranes"

Peter Wharton, Hermes Bloomfield-Gadêlha & Andrew T. Conn

"Modular simulation framework for Electro-ribbon Actuators"

Bruno Castro, Richard S Diteesawat, Majid Taghavi & Jonathan Rossiter

Praminda Caleb-Solly

Professor of Assistive Robotics and Intelligent Health Technologies, BRL

Day 3: Prototyping - Teams develop a solution

Assistive Robotics and Intelligent Health Technologies.

12:00PM – 1:00PM 

12th May

Praminda Caleb-Solly

Professor of Assistive Robotics and Intelligent Health Technologies, BRL

Session: Disrupting the Provision of Care

Exploring the potential for Robotics & AI to give us greater control and dignity whenever we need care.

09:30-10:15 

27th May

Alan Winfield

Professor of Robot Ethics, BRL

Professor Winfield co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and his research is focussed on the science, engineering and ethics of intelligent robots. Winfield is an advocate for robot ethics; he sits on the executive of the IEEE Standards Association Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, and chairs Working Group P7001, drafting a new IEEE standard on Transparency of Autonomous Systems. 

He has published over 250 works including Robotics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012). 

“Global Aerial Localisation Using Image and Map Embeddings”

by N. Samano, M. Zhou and A. Calway

“Liquid Metal Logic for Soft Robotics”

by Martin Garrad, Hsing-Yu Chen, Andrew T. Conn, Helmut Hauser, and Jonathan Rossiter

"Weighted Node Mapping and Localisation on a Pixel Processor Array"

by H. Castillo Elizalde, Y. Liu, L. Bose and W. Mayol-Cuevas

“Asynchronous Reliability-Aware Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning”

by M. Li, A. G. Richards and M. Sooriyabandara

“Trajectory Optimisation in Learned Multimodal Dynamical Systems via Latent-ODE Collocation”

by A. Scannell, C. H. Ek, A. G. Richards

"Uncertainty-aware deep learning for robot touch: Application to Bayesian tactile servo control"

by Manuel Floriano Vazquez & Nathan Lepora

"Towards integrated tactile sensorimotor control in anthropomorphic soft robotic hands"

by Nathan Lepora, Andrew Stinchcombe, Christopher Ford, Alfred Brown, John Lloyd, Manuel Giuseppe Catalano, Matteo Bianchi, Benjamin Ward-Cherrier

View publication here

"Optimal Deep Learning for Robot Touch"

by Nathan Lepora, John Lloyd. 

View Ipublicartion here

"Slip detection for grasp stabilisation with a multi-fingered tactile robot hand"

by Jasper Wollaston James, Nathan Lepora. 

View publication here

ViTac 2021: Trends and Challenges in Visuo-Tactile Perception

The workshop will be divided into three themes: development of touch sensors (hardware focussed); multimodal robot perception with vision and tactile sensing; and inspirations from how humans integrate visual and haptic information for robot tasks.

Organisers include Prof. Nathan Lepora (BRL)

Further info here

We will be presenting over 50 talks across four separate tracks in a blended format. A series of talks will take place from within our lab on topics ranging from Smart Automation to Assistive Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Speakers Include: 

• Prof. Arthur Richards (Co-Director, BRL / Professor of Robotics and Control)
• Prof. Manuel Giuliani (Co-Director, BRL / Professor in Embedded Cognitive AI for Robotics)
• Associate Prof. Sabine Hauert (Associate Professor of Swarm Engineering)
• Prof. Praminda Caleb-Solly (Professor of Assistive Robotics and Intelligent Health Technologies)
• Dr. Matt Studley (Wallscourt Associate Professor in Technology Ethics)
• Prof. Chenguang (Charlie) Yang (MSc Programme Director / Professor of Robotics)
• Mark Corderoy (Manager, BRL Hardware Incubator)
• Prof. Kerstin Eder (Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science)
• Prof. Ioannis Ieropoulos (Professor of Bioenergy and Self-Sustainable Systems and Director of the Bristol BioEnergy Centre)
• Paul Harper (Manager, FARSCOPE/PhD Programme)
• Prof. Alan Winfield (Professor of Robot Ethics)
• Prof. Helmut Hauser (Senior Lecturer, Soft Robotics)
• Noor Alakhawand (PhD Student)
• David Lennard (Head of Business and Operations)
• Dr Hemma Philamore (MSc Programme Co-Director)

The full list of speakers can be found in the BRL21 Conference Programme Navigator. 

"Growing into Shape: Evolution of morphology through sculpting in a voxel based robot"

by Katt Walker