Welcome to the UK Robotics Summer School web pages. We are organising a Summer School to take place from 2 to 6 June 2025 in the beautiful city of Edinburgh.

Overview: This is a 5 day Summer School from June 2-6 2025, aimed at developing learning, engagement and knowledge exchange within the field of robotics. This school will offer a combination of lectures, tutorials, and industry presentations, focusing on cutting-edge topics in robotics.

Location: Postgraduate Centre (PG01) Heriot-Watt University.

Abstract: The provoking interpretation of the reward hypothesis in “Reward is enough” [Silver e.a., 2021] is due to an overly wide scope “of what we mean by goals and purposes”, while in a more restricted setting the validity of the reward hypothesis can be precisely established [Bowling e.a., 2023]. There are obviously applications of reinforcement learning where the validity of the reward hypothesis is less clear, such as in multi-agent, multi-objective, and biological reinforcement learning, as well as in learning under uncertainty or from human feedback.

 Dr. Oscar Mendez Maldonado is an award-winning researcher specializing in robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. Currently serving as the Machine Vision Lead at Locus Robotics, he has significantly contributed to the fields of autonomous agents, collaborative robotics, and high-level scene understanding. Dr. Mendez earned his Ph.D. in Robotics and Computer Vision from the University of Surrey, where his thesis on "Collaborative Strategies for 3D Reconstruction, Localisation, and Pathplanning" was awarded the BMVA Sullivan Thesis Prize in 2018. Dr.

Abstract

Speaker: Leonardo Hinckeldey

Title: Assistax: A Benchmark for Robust Reinforcement Learning in Collaborative Multi-Agent Settings

Abstract:

Abstract: Scenario-based Simulated Testing is a common paradigm for testing complex cyber-physical systems like autonomous vehicles. This is particularly true for systems containing black-box ML components, which make formal verification or traditional engineering analysis difficult. However, answering the simple question of "how likely is it that the system will fail to meet its specification?" can actually be a significant challenge, especially when the true failure probability is rare.

PhD students - Are you curious about what lies beyond the academic path?
Join us for a casual, inspiring session with Informatics alumnus and serial tech founder Rolf Baxter, as he shares his journey from PhD student to building billion-dollar companies. In just a decade, Rolf has built Oosto, a leading computer vision company, launched and sold Zenith AI—a no-code AI platform—and is now on his third tech venture.

The National Robotarium at Heriot-Watt University, in partnership with the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, is organizing a Robotic Surgery Technologies Workshop. This event aims to promote collaboration between researchers across Edinburgh, bringing together experts and individuals with a shared interest in advancing robotic surgery technologies.

Abstract: The past few years has witnessed significant progress in the field of legged locomotion and manipulation. This is mainly due to the availability of high-performance hardware as well as development of algorithms that scale to high-dimensional, hybrid and under-actuated systems. In this talk, I will present my recent research efforts, mainly on the algorithmic side, on developing efficient predictive controllers that can be complemented with supervised/reinforcement learning for real-time execution in the real world.