The Kent Robotics Lab

In order to facilitate cross-group research collaboration the computing Lab has recently funded the founding of a robotics laboratory. The laboratory is also supported by a long term loan of electronic test equipment from BT exact.

The primary research foci of the robotics lab are to explore techniques that facilitate long-term autonomous operation (survival) in natural environments, and to test cognitive models by embodiment and operation in natural environments, however a wide range of projects are currently being undertaken, building on departmental strengths in bio-inspired computing, concurrent computing, collective intelligence and pervasive computing.

Enabling the ideas emerging from these areas to be tested on practical and affordable machines is proving invaluable.

Some of the current research projects and collaborations are outlined below. (under construction)

Phase transitions in multi-robot systems. is an example of the swarm intelligence work undertaken by Colin Johnson and Alex Freitas that we are hoping to embody soon	The Transterpreter The Transterpreter is an occam interpreter built by Christian Jacobsen and Damian Dimmich . It currently runs on Desktop machines (Mac OS X, Linux and Windows) and various embedded devices (LEGO Mindstorms, PDAs and the Gameboy Advance). Various papers about the Transterpreter are available in the papers section of the Transterpreter website.
The Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems is run by Howard Bowman and is generating lots of ideas for us to test	Siddartha Ghosh is developing a model for collective decision making using foraging in Honey bees as the initial concrete example, under the supervision of Ian Marshall. We are aiming to embody the model using a swarm of robots.
Wesam Habboush, supervised by David Shrimpton and Ian Marshall is also working on collective intelligence - this time on task allocation and scheduling	Matts weblog The description of many of the toys that will (eventually) form the basis of our robot swarm can be found buried in this valuable source of Kent robotrivia. The log is maintained by Matt Jadud .