Brains on Board Project

In the Brains on Board project we are working with researchers at the Â鶹´«Ã½ of Sheffield and Queen Mary, Â鶹´«Ã½ of London to make this vision a reality. Our work includes research on honey bee behaviour, computational modelling of insect brains, experiments with autonomous robots in the lab and outdoors, and research into computationally efficient emulation of brain models on GPUs.

  is a programme grant funded by the . It comprises the groups of (Â鶹´«Ã½ of Sheffield Computer Science, PI), (Â鶹´«Ã½ of Sheffield Biology), (Queen Mary, Â鶹´«Ã½ of London Life Sciences), and (AI research group in Informatics) and (Life Sciences).

Through ActiveAI, an EPSRC-funded International Centre-to-Centre grant, Brains on Board has also partnered with an Australian cluster of excellence in insect neuroscience and behaviour [with the goal of developing a new class of controllers for problems in which insects excel but current AI/machine learning methods struggle. The Australian network comprises]: Macquarie Â鶹´«Ã½ (, Ken Cheng, Ajay Narendra); Flinders Â鶹´«Ã½ () and the Â鶹´«Ã½ of Queensland (). By combining cutting edge methods in insect neuroscience with computational and biorobotic modelling, we will both advance neuroscience and enable ActiveAI solutions which are efficient in learning and final network configuration, robust to real-world conditions and learn rapidly.

Prof Andy Philippides explains our insect-inspired navigation algorithms and showcases a robot that autonomously follows a memorised route based on one of the algorithms.