Alan Winfield's Web Log

I spent a rare few hours in the lab the last few days, actually doing research. Or at least attempting to. Actually I made no progress at a...

Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots that we inject into the vascular system: the swarm swims to the source of the problem, then either del...

Imagine this situation. A large company decides to significantly increase the level of automation at one of its facilities. A facility that ...

Evolutionary robotics has been around for about 20 years: it's about 15 years since Stefano Nolfi and Dario Floreano published their se...

The question  Robotics by Invitation  asked its panel in November 2014, was: What does the first successful landing on a comet mean for th...

Dear robotics and AI researcher Do you use simulation as a research tool? If you write papers with results based on simulation and submit ...

I was very pleased to be invited to Science, Innovation and Society: achieving Responsible Research and Innovation last week. I was asked t...

A couple of weeks ago I was a panelist on a public debate at the 2014 Battle of Ideas . The title of the debate was  The robots are coming:...

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously characterised subjective experience as “something that it is like to be…” and suggested that for a bat, f...

Several weeks ago I wrote about our work on robots with internal models : robots with a simulation of themselves and their environment insi...

Here is the submitted text for the article  Artificial intelligence will not turn into a Frankenstein's monster , published in The Obser...

Republished here is a short piece for  The Conversation :  4-4-2 becomes 0101: inside the competitive world of robot football , published 4 ...

So. We've been busy in the lab the last few months. Really exciting. Let me explain. For a couple of years I've been thinking abou...

Want to create human-equivalent AI? Well, broadly speaking, there are 3 approaches open to you: design it, reverse-engineer it or evolve it....

There have been several stories in the last few weeks about emotional robots ; robots that feel. Some are suggesting that this is the next b...

Last week I attended the  launch event  for a new  NESTA  publication called  Our work here is done: Visions of a Robot Economy . It was an...