Cohort 3’s Doug Tilley has recently undertaken some outreach work. He writes:
“During the second week of March, I visited Bathwick St Mary Church School in Bath as a STEM ambassador, attending the school’s research week. This was a week dedicated to showing off scientists, researchers and professionals in STEM. The visit was a fantastic opportunity to talk about Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, as well as talk about some of the work and research that occurs at the University.
As part of the visit, I visited the year 1’s and the year 5’s. Along with me came BEATRIX as well as some custom UAVs to show off. BEATRIX is a humanoid robot used to teach the first year Electrical Engineering, Integrated Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and Robotics students at the University of Bath, developed as part of the Inte-R-action group led by Dr Uriel Martinez-Hernandez. It was a fantastic opportunity to show how we can use simple and accessible devices to teach a wide range of ages. The year 1’s had some fantastic questions about Robot Perception, how robots move and the future of having a robot, including some questions about a possible future of robotic companions, maybe drawing a parallel to Figure AI’s Brett Adcock? The class also made some very perceptible insights into how robots could be used in the future, with some very creative ideas of the future.
The year 5’s took a bit more of a difficult questioning approach, asking about the future of automation and robotics. Especially talking about some Terminator style robots, but this inspired some interesting conversations about good agents and bad agents. There was a constant flow of questions on all aspects of robotics, Artificial Intelligence, UAVs and even global politics! Sometimes the conversation did get a little distracted talking about potential for the future of an Artificial General Intelligence, a hot topic for debate at the moment!
Overall I hope that the school enjoyed the visit as much as I did, it was a good opportunity to give some of the children insights into the sort of work and research we do at the University, as well as to answer some quite difficult questions!”
