Research Lifecycle Programme / The change projects / Design a research IT innovation community (Q) / Robotics Innovation Club

Robotics Innovation Club

Robotics Leads: Professor Angelo Cangelosi & Professor Barry Lennox

The Robotics innovation club aims to meet monthly to allow staff and researchers to meet and network with people who have similar technology / research interests.

These meetings follow on from the Robotics @ Manchester workshop in September 2018, organised by Digital Futures with Professors Angelo Cangelosi and Barry Lennox, at which University researchers presented ongoing research projects in this area and identified proposals and opportunities for a proposed University of Manchester (UOM) robotics entity/centre/institute. If you are interested in hearing about future activity with this community, please contact digitalfutures@manchester.ac.uk.

The purpose of Robotics club activity is to allow UoM researchers to:

  • Present their research and discuss sticking points that the community may be able to help them with
  • Find new collaboration partners from across the University
  • Ask questions within the community so that members can share experience/ideas to save time
  • Share ideas on funding calls that are relevant to the community
  • Share equipment (if free) and resources
  • Discuss technology/methodology advances and provide advice on what to/not to buy
  • Advertise talks that may be of interest to the community & widen participation across campus.

For any queries or further information, please contact matthew.thomas@manchester.ac.uk.

If you are interested in this community, you may also be interested in Digital Futures’ Data Science & AI Institute, the access point to the University’s expertise in data science and artificial intelligence, which facilitates interactions between researchers and problem holders in the area of data science and AI and owns the University’s data science strategy. Digital Futures is the University’s interdisciplinary network operating across the whole range of the University’s digital research.

This club incorporates activity from the previous Drones Community

Sign-Up

Join the Robotics Club
Past Events

Highlights from the May 2020 meeting: 

The most recent meeting of this Innovation Community featured a talk from Dr Warren Mansell titled “Comparative robotics as a paradigm for testing an interdisciplinary theory of behaviour: Perceptual Control Theory”. This was followed by time for questions and networking and discussions  Robotics, AI and Big Data.

March community meeting: 

This Innovation Community meeting was led by Kiera Gould, Business Engagement and Dr Hujun Yin, School of Engineering. The meeting started with a number of presentations, which followed by time for networking and discussions on industry engagement with Robotics, AI and Big Data. 

You can view the presentations on the Podcast. The timings for each presentation are listed below: 

  • 0:00 – 07:49 – Introductions (Emma Finch and Kiera Gould)
  • 07:49 – 39:35 – ‘What deep learning (and AI) is and can do’ (Hujun Yin)
  • 39:35 – 1:15:24 – Christopher Yau (slides unfortunately not available)
  • 1:14:24 – 1:47:27 – ‘Text analytics: Unlocking the evidence from large-scale free-text data’ (Goran Nenadic)
  • 1:47:27 –  2:14:27 – ‘Operations Research and AI’ (Julia Handl)
  • 2:14:27 – 2:38:48 – ‘Overview of National Centre of Text Mining’ (John Mcnaught)

 

February Community Meeting

At the February meeting of this Innovation Community, we discussed:

  • The Membership of the community
  • Current competitions and funding opportunities
  • Meeting, lectures and RLP workshops that may be of interest 

The majority of time was spent networking with colleagues to discuss collaboration opportunities. 

Slides presented at the meeting are available below.

 

Robotics and AI innovation community meeting at The University of Manchester – Wednesday 30 October 

We invited current users and interested researchers to a meeting to discuss the use of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in research across the University. The meeting followed on from a Robotics@Manchester workshop in September 2018, organised by Digital Futures with Professors Angelo Cangelosi and Barry Lennox, at which University researchers presented ongoing research projects in this area and identified proposals and opportunities for a proposed University of Manchester (UOM) robotics entity/centre/institute. If you are interested in hearing about future activity with this community, please contact digitalfutures@manchester.ac.uk. 

Over 50 people from across the University expressed an interest in the meeting representing all three faculties, which resulted in a broad spectrum of research being presented and discussed. This resulted in participants making new connections with colleagues whom they were unlikely to encounter in their day-to-day activities. The meeting began with a brief introduction to the Research Lifecycle Programme by Emma Finch, followed by presentations and discussion. There was a break halfway through the presentations for networking and further discussion over lunch where researchers compared similarities and differences between the methodologies and requirements of using Robotics and AI in their research.  

We had a number of talks at the event, some of which can be found on our Podcast if you want to catch up (presentations available to listen to have the times in brackets). 

  • Introduction to Research Lifecycle Programme and Innovation Communities (0:00 – 09:49) 
    Emma Finch, Innovation Lead
  • Electric actuators for robot joints (09:50 – 19:24) 
    Judith Apsley, School of Engineering  
  • Deep Learning and Machine Vision (19:25 – 45:44) 
    Hujun Yin, School of Engineering
  • Predicting the human in HRI – and other things (45:45 – 1:02:11) 
    Guido Herrmann, School of Engineering
  • Small-molecule robotics 
    David Leigh, School of Natural Science
The University of Manchester