ESRC Small Grants Scheme Success

Dr Clare Wilkinson and network member, Karen Bultitude of the Science Communication Unit, UWE have been successful in their application for an ESRC small grant for a project titled 'Talking Robots'. The project will critically examine strategies for public engagement with robotics technologies utilising a series of quantitative and qualitative methods. It aims to explore public and expert attitudes to both robotics and engagement within novel areas of science, technology and engineering. This project will look in detail at the responses to some of the Walking with Robots events.

Alan, Claire and Bill attend Brighton Science Festival

Alan Winfield, Claire Rocks and Bill Bigge demonstrated some e-pucks, robot racers and lego mindstorms mars rovers at two events in the Brighton Komedia and Hove Park School as part of the Brighton Science Festival. Both days were a great success attracting large numbers of visitors.

• Date: 18th February 2007 and 24th February 2007

Alan and Claire attend the CreScENDO Network Meeting

The CreScENDO project was established by science communicator Steve Mesure to build links between the many people and organisations trying to engage the public in science, and share knowledge, good practice and expertise. On February 6th 2007 Alan Winfield and Claire Rocks attended a meeting of 13 groups delivering major projects in this area.

• Date: 7th February 2007

HP Science Lectures

Alan Winfield gave a talk in the Hewlett Packard Science Lecture series, entitled "Walking with Robots: a new kind of engagement between humans and robots" on 24th January 2007, at HP labs, Bristol.

• Date: 26th January 2007

FP7 - Robotics Information Day

Members of the Walking with Robots Network (Barbara Webb and Dave Barnes) presented at the FP7 - Robotics Information Day held at Imperial College, London on 17th January 2007. This event was organised by the IET Robotics and Mechatronics Network to look at the specific robotic elements of the European Framework 7 programme.

• Date: 19th January 2007

Walking with Robots on Bright Sparks

Noel Sharkey co-presented the 6 part series Bright Sparks for BBC N. Ireland. As part of the series Noel did a surgery each week where he presented robots and discussed them in technical detail - one robot was Kaspar from Kerstin Dautenhahn's group.

• Date: 18th January 2007