In early November I got an amazing opportunity to go and visit the labs at the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) at Sussex University.  Ian is friends with Linc Smith, one of the research fellows there, and he extended me an invite to go along and have a tour of the lab and a play with the robots that they build there.  How cool was that?

I went along with my friend Shardcore who took his video camera with him so that we could capture some of the bots for posterity.  I also took a disposable camera to get some photos, but sadly none of these came out.

CCNR is an interdisciplinary research group that involves both the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience and the Sussex Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems group. Their lab is a robotics hobbyists dream.  It’s little more than a small, dark room half way along an out of the way corridor in the school of Informatics, with Bill, the technician, tucked away in the corner.  There are workbenches running along every wall in this room and every surface (and quite a lot of the floor) is piled high with electronics parts, computers, bits of plastic and metal for building robot bodies and the carcasses of a few dead bots.

CCNR Labs from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

Intermingled with this was a few robots in progress that the group has received funding to build, including the bot that they take to schools to introduce schoolchildren to robotics and AI.

CCNR schoolbot from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

It also had a cnc machine that Shardcore used to make some funky octopi.

CNC machine at CCNR from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

Bill gave us a demo of some of their robots and explanations of how they work.  He was a mine of fascinating information and it was great to chat to him and get some tips on moving from kits and onto designing and building my own bots from scratch.  He is self taught himself, and it was really encouraging to know that you can get to that level without any formal tuition or experience.

Roller bot from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

Afterward, Linc took us to see the gantry robot, a robot he build for his phd.  It is a huge construction with a 360 degree camera that you programmed with actual insect movements plotted from psychology and biology experiments.  The robot would then mimic those movements, allowing researchers to see, from an insect point of view, the landmarks, path and trails that the insect was using to navigate.

The gantry Robot from Emily Toop on Vimeo.

I would really like to thank Linc and Bill for giving me the opportunity to visit the labs and see what they do there.  It was immensely inspiring and I enjoyed myself very much.