Barbara Webb awarded five-year EPSRC Advanced Career Fellowship

AI insect-inspired approaches to robot grasping

Congratulations to Barbara Webb, who has been awarded a five-year EPSRC Advanced Career Fellowship worth over £2M to study AI insect-inspired approaches to robot grasping.

The current inability of robots to grasp diverse objects with efficiency and reliability severely limits their range of application.  Agriculture, mining and environmental clean-up are just three examples where - unlike a factory - the items to be handled could have a huge variety of shapes and appearances, need to be identified amongst clutter, and need to be grasped firmly for transport while avoiding damage. Secure grasp of unknown objects amongst clutter remains an unsolved problem for robotics, despite improvements in 3D sensing and reconstruction, in manipulator sophistication and the recent use of large-scale machine learning.

 

Useful links

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Ccouncil - EPSRC

Barbara Webb

Insect Robotics