We place a high value on public engagement, not least because our research is publicly funded. Here are some recent public engagement activities carried out by Dr Hunt and the lab (most images are clickable links).
Robot Obstacle Course – Schools Outreach
I attended the FUTURES 2022 schools day at the SS Great Britain in Sept 2022. Together with James Ward, we devised a robot obstacle course for the children (Year 6 and Year 7, so around ages 10-12) to drive the robot around with a Playstation controller. This was an opportunity to tell them about how robots could be used for keeping important places (like power plants, data centres) safe. We had a leaderboard for the best lap times (like Top Gear) and a great day was had by all.
BSA Award Lecturer in Digital Innovation
I was the British Science Association’s 2021 Award Lecturer in Digital Innovation, which given the COVID-19 pandemic was delivered as a short-form video on YouTube. My talk on ‘functional heterogeneity’ (adaptive diversity) in teams (animal and robot) is a good introduction to one of my recent research interests. I gave a full in-person talk at the September 2022 BSA Science Festival in Leicester.
Talk on Swarm Engineering at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
I gave a talk on Swarm Engineering to a public crowd of around 150 at the famous Rutherford Appleton Lab in Oxfordshire in 2019.
Nesta Future Curious Podcast
I spoke to Nesta for a podcast interview entitled “Robot Swarms and Technology of the Next Decade”.
Nesta Tipping Point Prize Essay
I won First Place in the ‘Tipping Point Prize’ essay competition run by Nesta in 2019,
for my essay entitled: “Swarms of Robots: Much More Than the Sum of Their Parts”.
EPSRC Photography Competition 2019
With Jerry Wright and Sabine Hauert, our photograph of Kilobots interacting with projected light ‘pheromone trails’ placed in the ‘Equipment & Facilities’ category. I gave it the title “One Hundred Tiny Painters”.
