Dance with robotlets at Being There showcase

Today, from 10AM to 6PM the Watershed digital creativity centre in Bristol is hosting the Being There showcase – a celebration of three years of collaborative EPSRC funded research exploring the opportunities and challenges that arise when humans and robots share public space.

Being There is a four-year project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which brought together five collaborative teams of researchers from the Universities of Exeter, Bath, Oxford, Cambridge (formerly at Queen Mary University of London) and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory who have been working in collaboration with Watershed and a diverse range of creative practitioners to produce original work using state-of-the-art technologies to explore some of the current themes in robotics. 

Watershed’s Creative Director, Clare Reddington, and Being There project lead Professor Mark Levine (University of Exeter), will open the showcase together with celebrated British designer Sebastian Conran, who will give the keynote speech. The showcase will feature presentations from the Being There robotics researchers, quick fire sharing sessions with the project leads, spanning technology, engineering, psychology and security. There will also be opportunities to play with some commissioned robot games, and even dance with robotlets. The showcase will culminate in a Robot Cabaret featuring three fantastical robot performances hosted by Bill Thompson of BBC Click.

Department of Computer Science academics are involved in two projects, Happilee and Localisation Systems. read about them here:

http://being-there.org.uk/project/happilee-0

http://being-there.org.uk/project/localization-system

Read more about Being There: http://being-there.org.uk