From Sensing to Collaboration

With significant support from EPSRC, UCL together with the University of Oxford and a cohort of academic, industrial and deployment partners are embarking on an ambitious five-year programme of work on Engineering, Exploring and Exploiting the Building Blocks of Embodied Intelligence. The overarching aim of this research programme is to deliver autonomous systems which amplify human capacity and potential. Currently, robots are too specialised, uncooperative and too unsafe to be productive at scale. To contribute to productivity in strategically important areas such as social care, manufacturing, logistics, service, inspection or agriculture, future generations of robots need to be able to sense, interpret, act, navigate, coordinate and collaborate with an unprecedented acuity.
Berthouze's team will focus be on the design of affective capabilities with a specific focus on affective touch.