Swarm Robotics
Visiting Professor, Department of Electronics, University of York
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 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.
Biography: Short Biography Press and Media Projects: Research Artificial Culture blog posts
Biological Metaphors and Crisis
CoSMoS
Swarm Foraging Symbrion Public Engagement
Robotic Visions
Walking with Robots blog posts
Publications (html/pdf) Research students
Interview for Bright Club Bristol podcast #1, 1 December 2011
Technology update:
Robotics, for the Bath & Bristol Enterprise Network, Thursday 8
March 2012.
Where
is robotics going? at Being
Human in the Information Age, University of Warwick, Thursday 15
March 2012.
The
Thinking
Robot, Edinburgh Science Festival, Thursday 12 April 2012.
Panel
debate: What make a Robot Human, Cheltenham Science
Festival, 12 June 2012 (details tba).
Selected Recent publications
O’Dowd P, Winfield A and Studley M, The Distributed Co-Evolution of an Embodied Simulator and Controller for Swarm Robot Behaviours, in Proc IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2011) (full paper oral presentation), San Francisco, September 2011. Download pdf.
Winfield AFT and Erbas MD, On embodied memetic evolution and the emergence of behavioural traditions in robots, Memetic Computing, 3 (4), 2011, doi: 10.1007/s12293-011-0063-x. Download pdf (accepted version).
Jens Krause, Alan F.T. Winfield, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Interactive robots in experimental biology, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 26 (7), 2011, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.03.015.
Liu W, Winfield AFT, Open-hardware e-puck Linux extension board for experimental swarm robotics research, Microprocessors and Microsystems, 35 (1), 2011, doi:10.1016/j.micpro.2010.08.002. Download pdf (accepted version).
Liu W and Winfield AFT, Modelling and Optimisation of Adaptive Foraging in Swarm Robotic Systems, International Journal of Robotics Research, 29 (14), 2010, doi:10.1177/0278364910375139. Final revised text.