Arrival & Seating 

19:15

Welcome

@festivalofinnov #InnovateMalvern

Swarm robotics: holding a mirror up to nature?

Nature is teeming with collectives. Among the most impressive are social insect colonies: army ants undertake formidable foraging raids; honeybees collectively identify a good nest site; termites build elaborate mounds. Operating without central oversight, such ‘self-organised’ systems have valuable characteristics of robustness, flexibility and scalability. In engineering, increasingly we recognise the advantage of being inspired by nature: rather than invest in a single, sophisticated, expensive, and hard-to-replace robot, we can deploy ‘swarms’ of simple, cheap, and expendable units. The key challenge is to engineer ‘emergence’ – identify the right set of simple behaviours the robots need to follow to achieve the desired group-level capability. This keynote will introduce the exciting new field of swarm robotics highlighting some potential applications, and touch on some of the interesting philosophical questions that arise (the nature of consciousness, causation, and ‘what is life?’). 

Dr Edmund Hunt is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol, where he is working with Dr Sabine Hauert on swarm robotics in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Previously he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. His PhD was in Complexity Sciences, at the University of Bristol where he researched the collective behaviour of ant colonies as complex biological systems. He has also worked in the banking sector, completed an MPhil in economics at the University of Oxford and BSc in physics with theoretical physics from Imperial College.

@DrEdmundHunt

Networking & #WorcestershireHour tweet-up

Refreshments

Every Monday evening from 8-9pm #WorcestershireHour connects local businesses, charities and the communities across Worcestershire with an active Twitter following of over 15,000 local accounts. We'll be tweeting live from this event, so join us to meet others face-to-face from the network.

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