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Engineering Education, Resources and Standards
News Release from: University of Wales, Newport
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 06 March 2007
Project to investigate robot
collaboration
Understanding how self-regulation emerges can improve existing technologies for automated manufacturing.
Underwater robotics and industrial automation are two of the areas which will benefit from research starting up in the Robotic Intelligence Lab at the University of Wales, Newport as a result of a new funding award The research project, "Defying the rules: how self-regulatory social systems work", will study how behavioural rules and environmental factors enable self-regulating interactive behaviour to emerge, and examine a wide range of social systems - human, animal and robotic - in order to develop theories and models of emergent self-regulation
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 28 Sep 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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"In particular, I will be researching multi-robot control methods for applications where communication is limited but reliability is all-important - in areas such as underwater robotics", explained the Lab's Director and Senior Lecturer, Dr Torbjorn Dahl.
"Understanding how self-regulation emerges can also improve the way governments handle community regeneration and can also improve existing technologies for automated manufacturing".
The funding has been awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) which will give the project over half a million pounds over the next three years.
"Out of this, Newport will receive in excess of GBP 150,000 which will support the proposed research, enabling me to upgrade existing robots and take on a research student", added Dr Dahl.
"The funding has been awarded through a dedicated 'ideas factory' event on the topic of emergence".
"Ideas factory events are used by the EPSRC to promote transdisciplinary research into areas identified as particularly important or promising".
The funding, from the EPSRC will enable Dr Dahl of the department of Computing at Newport Business School to carry out the research in collaboration with Professor Kim Christensen and Dr Elsa Arcaute, physicists at Imperial College London, Ana Sendova-Franks, a biologist at the University of West of England (UWE) and Angela Espinosa, a social scientist from the University of Hull.
Last year Dr Dahl had the distinction of being selected from almost 10,000 applicants to be part of a team of 100 robotics professionals to help Lego develop its next generation robotics product, NXT.
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