Connect with AI

We have developed a simple yet "intelligent" robotic platform to interact with the public and generate interest and discussion. Several of these autonomous Connect4 playing robots have been constructed for use as demonstration tools at university open days, science festivals and school visits. The robots have proved to be a great success in capturing the interest of children and adults alike. The simple idea of having a robot playing a popular game against human opponents in the real world appeals to a broad spectrum of people including those who have had no previous interest in artificial intelligence. front_pic

As the robot platform integrates work from machine vision, artificial intelligence and robotic control, it has allowed staff manning demonstrations to:

  • engage people in discussion about each of these fields,
  • provide an opportunity to get people to think about how computers' abilities differ from our own
  • give them a brief exposure to the world of cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

The robots are taken out into local schools (view timetable) as teaching aids to encourage interest in science and engineering, especially AI and cognitive science.

It is possible to use the robot arms to explore a broad range of education themes:

  • how machines' abilities differ from our own, e.g. which is the hardest task for a machine seeing, picking up pieces or planning its moves and why this should be different for us.
  • How we program computers to think.
  • How our engineering of the environment makes it easy for the robot arm, and do we engineer the environment for ourselves?
  • The state of the art in AI, machine vision and robotics.
  • And with household robots becoming more and more ubiquitous, what do we actually want robots to do?

The school visits form part of our developing programme for widening participation (encouraging students from a greater diversity background to apply to university).

In addition we can use the robots to support after-schools activities and specialist school workshops on AI and robotics.