The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh (Robotarium East) has been successful with a Horizon 2020 research proposal, called TrimBot2020. The project will research the underlying robotics and vision technologies and prototype the first outdoor garden trimming robot. The robot will navigate over varying terrain, approach rose bushes, hedges and boxwood topiary, to trim them to an ideal shape.

"Robots that can understand human emotions are being brought into Scottish schools to help with teaching. It’s hoped the machines will be used to assist in subjects such as history or geography – and because they can sense when children are bored, frustrated or unhappy, they’ll be able to adapt their teaching methods in a simpler way to a human tutor."

The Edinburgh Centre for Robotics would like to invite applications from UK robotics research groups to participate in a collaboration using the NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot, funded by an EPSRC Institutional Sponsorship Grant.

This week, three academics from the Robotics Lab at Heriot-Watt University (Robotarium West), Dr Patricia A Vargas (Director), Dr Katrin Lohan (Deputy Director) and Prof Ruth Aylett plus 3 other researchers, Steven Kay, Ingo Keller and Srinivasan Janarthanam, went down to London to give interviews at the BBC and present demos to show their work. They took many robotic equipment, including three NAOs, several e-pucks, one air-drone and Nikita our iCub talking head.

Two Heriot-Watt researchers, Amol Deshmukh and Dr. Srini Janarthanam from the department of Computer Science, recently took two robots into Beeslack Community High School in Penicuik. The researchers, led by Professor Ruth Aylett and Dr Helen Hastie, are part of a large European project EMOTE (www.emote-project.eu), which also has partners in Sweden, Germany and Portugal. The team have been creating a learning environment that includes a socially aware robotic tutor and a large touch table.

On 2nd September 2015, Sky News correspondent James Matthewson visited the Robotarium facilities at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. ‘Jazz’, ‘BLUE’, ‘The Castle’, a Prosthetic Hand, and other robots featured each hour from 9:30, as part of the Robot Revolution week at Sky News.

All six videos from the coverage can be found in our channel's YouTube playlist.

In collaboration with the University of Glasgow, Prof Oliver Lemon, from The Interaction Lab at Heriot-Watt University, and part of the ECR Robotarium facilities, has been awarded Horizon 2020 funding for their proposal “MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot” (MuMMER). This is a follow-on of their work on socially intelligent robot communication in the FP7 JAMES project. It brings 900K euros over 4 years to the Interaction Lab.

We are delighted to issue the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics Newsletter for August 2015.

Read about upcoming events, latest news, Robotarium equipment (available to all researchers across the UK) and more!

We hope you enjoy it!