Richard Vaughan and Marco Dorigo visit the lab

Terrific to have visits today of both Richard Vaughan at his team from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Marco Dorigo from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Both Richard and Marco are luminaries in the field of Swarm Robotics: Richard for his part in developing the Player/Stage simulation tools and Marco for more or less pioneering the field of Swarm Intelligence and subsequent leading swarm robotics projects such as SWARM-BOT.

Heart Robot and BSc Robotics

It has been brilliant to see the amazing coverage of the Heart Robot project during the last two days. Check out this piece on BBC news online, or Google Heart Robot. Heart robot was jointly conceived by my colleagues Matthew Studley (lecturer in Robotics), Claire Rocks (research fellow) and BSc robotics student David McGoran. Matt and Claire wrote the bid for funding from the EPSRC partnerships for public engagement scheme, with David as a named researcher. I don't need to describe Heart Robot because you can see the whole story on the excellent project web pages here http://www.heartrobot.org.uk/.

The reason for this post is to say Way to go Team, and to anybody out there who might be thinking of studying robotics at university: this is what can happen when you come and do robotics at UWE!.