WWR Themes - overview
The business of doing robotics integrates an extraordinary range of disciplines. The traditional core disciplines of electrical, mechanical and software engineering are no longer sufficient. Intelligent robotics is increasingly biologically inspired and now involves disciplines as wide ranging as insect ethology, animal behaviour, psychology and the social sciences; biology, biochemistry and computational neuroscience; artificial intelligence and evolutionary computing.
The Walking with Robots activities have been divided into five separate themes. Each theme is designed to be broad ranging but to act as a focus for the Walking with Robots programme of events.
Theme 1: First Steps
Robots are not just science fiction; they are real, and people often have misconceived ideas about them. The early part of the project themed 'First steps' is about laying the foundations for the project, increasing public awareness about robots and the current research in intelligent robotics.
Theme 2: Exploration
Robots make excellent explorers. Robots can be used to explore environments too dangerous for humans, such as the edges of volcanoes, or outer space. At the boundaries of science, robots are helping us to explore deep questions about life and intelligence.
Theme 3: People
Robots are real entities with whom interactions are possible, and as robots become increasingly intelligent humans will interact with robots in new and quite probably surprising ways. This theme looks at the issues surrounding robots and people, and robots as people.
Theme 4: Environment
This theme will focus on how robots can be both environment-smart and environmentally friendly. Mindful of the current issues surrounding the environment we will look at how robots can help to address both the causes and effects of global warming.
Theme 5: Learning
One of the most challenging aspects of robotics is how we build robots that can learn or adapt their behaviour to new situations; this theme will focus on robot learning and robot evolution. Also, we will review what we have learned from this project, and what we have learned from robots.
Themes within the site
The Walking with Robots site will change colour to identify each of these 5 themes - if you have a particular preference you can use the links below to select how you would like to view the site, or you can choose to use the default theme.
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