Swarm Robotics
Public Engagement
Director of the UWE Science Communication Unit
EPSRC Senior Media Fellow
Associate Dean Faculty of Environment and Technology University of the West of England, Bristol Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY UK Phone: +44 117 328 2211 Fax: +44 117 328 2734 Email: Alan.Winfield@uwe.ac.uk
Welcome to my home page. I'm an engineer and academic at UWE Bristol, and I conduct research in mobile robotics within the Intelligent Autonomous Systems lab, now part of the joint UWE - University of Bristol Bristol Robotics Lab.
I am deeply interested in mobile robots for two reasons: (1), they are complex and potentially useful machines that embody just about every design challenge and discipline there is and (2), robots allow us to address some deep questions about life, emergence, culture and intelligence in a radically new way, that is by building models. Thus, robotics is for me both engineering and experimental philosophy.
I'm committed to the widest possible dissemination of research and ideas in science, engineering and technology and I believe that robots provide us with a wonderful vehicle for public engagement. Actually I would go a stage further and argue that intelligent robots will become ubiquitous in the near future and we therefore need to start a dialogue now about the ethical and moral questions that will arise.
Biological Metaphors and Crisis
CoSMoS
Swarm Foraging Symbrion Public Engagement
Robotic Visions
Walking with Robots PE training
Walking with Robots blog posts
Publications (html/pdf) Research students
New: Senior Media Fellowship: Intelligent Robots in Science and Society
12 February
2010, Culham Science Centre, Oxfordshire
22 February 2010, Sheffield Hallam University
Recent publications
Winfield AFT, 'Foraging Robots', in Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Editor in chief RA Meyers, Springer, 2009.
Winfield AFT, 'Towards an Engineering Science of Robot Foraging', pp 185-192 in Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 8, H Asama, H Kurokawa, J Ota and K Sekiyama (eds), Springer, 2009.
W. Liu, AFT. Winfield, and J. Sa. 'A macroscopic probabilistic model of adaptive foraging in swarm robotics systems'. In Proc. of 6th Vienna International Conference on Mathematical Modelling (Mathmod 2009), Special Session on Modelling the Swarm, Vienna, February 11 – 13, 2009.