Informatics at Cheltenham Science Festival

Members of the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe), a research group in the Department of Informatics,  attended the Cheltenham Science Festival 2013 and presented their most recent research results, including advancements achieved as part of DARWIN - an EU FP7 project in which King's College London is a partner. The aim of DARWIN is to develop a robot able to assemble objects autonomously, given a high level instruction. Based only on a possibly very abstract instruction, the robot is expected to assess the situation and then to self-reliantly solve the problem, e.g. to construct a tower by making the best use of the objects available on the table and even to make a decision on whether and how to use available tools if required.

The King’s College London booth was in "The Times Area 42" tent; researchers from the Department of Informatics Giuseppe Cotugno, Kris De Meyer, Liza Kostantinova, Min Li, Allen Jiang and Dr Thrishantha Nanayakkara presented the project to the audience - the Times tent was open to members of the general public aged 14 years old and older. The presentations were a great success: during the 3 days of the festival, the King's team attracted more than 600 festival participants, who were keen to hear about the robotics research at King's. Many more participants took informational pamphlets highlighting the research relating to DARWIN and other areas of CoRe that were also presented at the Festival, including the virtual palpation environment, the DARPA robotics Challenge, the granular jamming project, STIFF-FLOP (an EU project coordinated by King's) and Khepera mobile robots as a tool for teaching.

Photographs from the event are available online.