I have a long standing interest in artificial intelligence and artificial life which sees its culmination in practical robotics. I design and build both simulated and real world robots and program their minds using a variety of techniques. The photographs below are of Wheelie, a photovore controlled by a Basic Stamp. Other microcontrollers include the Oopic and the Motorola 68k.

Much of my most recent work has involved evolutionary robotics and has been carried out using hand crafted simulations of simplified 2D worlds. The picture below shows detour behaviour evolved using dynamic recurrent neural networks in simulation. Read my MSc dissertation for full details.

In order to further these ideas amongst the non-academic community Bill Bigge and myself have established a local robotics society here in Sussex. So far we hold only informal meetings to discuss ideas and work on joint projects. We hope to begin formal meetings and encourage both education and hands on project work when we can find a suitable space. Please email either of us for further information. In August 2002 we exhibited and demonstrated some autonomous robots at Robot Wars where intelligent systems are starting to give their users an edge in the big fight.