Name: Robots inspired by nature
Start: 2017-05-15T
End: 2017-05-15T
Location: The Winning Post

After many years of evolution, nature has evolved complex mechanisms that allow living beings to survive and adapt. By taking inspiration from these, biologically-inspired computing is providing new ways to solve challenging modern-day problems. This talk considers two applications of biologically-inspired computing - confirming the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and programming swarms of robots to be effective in foraging tasks.

Diagnosing Parkinson's with bio-inspired computing.

Stephen Smith (Reader, Department of Electronics, University of York)

Parkinson's disease can be difficult to diagnose confidently in its early stages as symptoms can easily be confused with other neurological conditions. This talk will show how bio-inspired computing can be used to improve accuracy of diagnosis by analysing patients' simple movement, such as finger-tapping, hand opening-closing and even reaching for a pint glass!

Robots dividing tasks like ants do.

Edgar Buchanan (Department of Electronics, University of York)

A group of robots that are foraging or retrieving food from a food source to the nest are susceptible to error in their navigation. This error will cause the robots to be unable to go back to the last place they found food. By taking inspiration from leaf-cutting ants, this talk will show how this error can be decreased by dividing the task into multiple smaller sub-tasks across the swarm.

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Robots inspired by nature

Diagnosing Parkinson's with bio-inspired computing.

Robots dividing tasks like ants do.

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