This week saw the fourth Edinburgh Centre for Robotics annual conference, with talks and posters presented by the 40 or so students within our Doctoral Training Programme. I was honoured to be awarded with the prize for best Talk and Poster by the industry judges.
Author: JamesG
RCUK Policy Internship Application
Given my interest in the societal impact of scientific research and the public understanding of science, I recently applied for a research council funded internship at the Royal Society. If successful, I will spend 3 months with them in London some time next year (after my teaching commitments end in April).
As part of my application, I was asked to produce a short policy brief on a topic not directly related to my research (so no drones!). I chose the notion of “Electronic Personhood”, and more generally the possible rights, responsibilities and other legal issues we may face with respect to Artificial Intelligences in the not too distance future. The policy brief can be read here.
Edinburgh International Science Festival 2016
At the end of March this year, I organised a number of events at the Edinburgh International Science Festival engaging members of the public in current robotics research. These were seen over 4 thousand people over the course of five days, making it an exhausting but also incredibly rewarding experience!
Attached is the report I made for the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics executive about the content and success of this event, if you want to know more about what we did.
MSc Thesis (2015)
Scale-Aware Real-Time Scene Reconstruction for a Micro Aerial Vehicle
Principal goal for project:
A study into vision-based SLAM for small aerial vehicles, and a user-interface to control such a vehicle equipped with an onboard camera.
Abstract:
This thesis sets out to produce a 3D reconstruction of the environment explored by a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) equipped with only a single camera and inertial measurement unit. To achieve our goal, we combine a scale-aware variant of the localisation and mapping algorithm PTAM with an incremental real-time reconstruction algorithm. We demonstrate that it is possible to extract the distance and angle between the MAV and a target selected within the reconstruction with reasonable accuracy in the case of a small, simple scene. Additionally, we show a correlation between the amount of data in the map and improved accuracy of distance measurements, such that larger maps should yield better measurements. We posit that this is a proof of concept that our scale-aware reconstruction could be utilised in allowing way point based control of the MAV and more.
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