Football playing robots, intelligent houses, autonomous lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners - what next?
This is just one of the questions computer scientist Dr Ulrich Nehmzow will be addressing at the town and gown lecture to be held at the Town Hall on Tuesday 7 May. Entitled 'Science, robotics and the future' Dr Nehmzow's lecture will address some of the scientific challenges, current research issues and future hope for robotics research.
The University of Essex has one of the largest mobile robotics groups in the UK, and is at the centre of ground-breaking research in this field. Intelligent robotics is becoming increasingly relevant to today's world, more and more autonomous, intelligent robots are being used in industrial and domestic applications. For many tasks, such as cleaning, transportation or exploration it is becoming increasingly attractive to employ robots.
However,
as Dr Nehmzow will discuss in his lecture, robotics research at the
University is delving much deeper than this. He says that 'Robotics
is actually helping us to understand more about ourselves and the
environment around us. Examples of this can be seen in research in
the Department of Computer Science at the University. Robotics
research is, for instance, being used to investigate the
navigational behaviour of pigeons, or insects such as bees and ants,
and signal processing methods are being developed that will analyse
and interpret noisy, contradictory or ambiguous data - a task that
living beings have to perform all the time.'
The lecture will
present a wide range of robotics research topics, such as robot
learning, navigation, industrial applications or robot simulation,
and introduce robots that are already operating in real world
scenarios, from humanoid robots to autonomous lawn mowers and vacuum
cleaners.
Dr Nehmzow will be demonstrating the robotic technology developed at the University of Essex during the lecture and will be discussing some of the possibilities for robotics in the future.
This year's Town and Gown Lecture by Dr Ulrich Nehmzow will be held in the Moot Hall at Colchester Town Hall on Tuesday 7 May at 7.30pm. Tickets are available from the Mayors Office, telephone 01206 282206 and are priced at £4. The price includes refreshments. Proceeds will go to the Mayors Appeal Fund.