Overview
Research Interests
- Evolutionary computing
- Neural networks
- Robotics
- Shape optimisation
- UAV control
Publications
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Conference Publication: Towards the targeted environment-specific evolution of robot components
Collins, Jack, Howard, David, Geles, Wade and Maire, Frederic (2018). Towards the targeted environment-specific evolution of robot components. 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2018, Kyoto, Japan, 15 - 19 July 2018. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3205455.3205541
Available Projects
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Scaling up a soft robotics simulator
Searching for a student with interests in robotic simulators and code optimisation - the project is to modify the Voxcad simualtion package to allow for larger-scale robots to be simulated. Voxcad models soft robots as a series of contiguous deformable voxels. Each voxel can be one of several types, e.g., contracting muscle, expanding muscle, soft tissue, hard (bone) support.
There are two main approaches to be investigated:
1) Split a large robot deterministically into a number of equal sections, simulate each section individually and create methods that allow the sections to effectively communicate their deformations to each other
2) Analyse the composition of a large robot, and create large continuous sections of a single type,which can be replaced with a larger-scale voxel of the same type.
We can also have a look at parallelising the simulator onto a high-performance cluster.
Publications
Conference Publication
-
Towards the targeted environment-specific evolution of robot components
Collins, Jack, Howard, David, Geles, Wade and Maire, Frederic (2018). Towards the targeted environment-specific evolution of robot components. 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2018, Kyoto, Japan, 15 - 19 July 2018. New York, NY United States: Association for Computing Machinery. doi: 10.1145/3205455.3205541
Possible Research Projects
Note for students: The possible research projects listed on this page may not be comprehensive
or up to date. Always feel free to contact the staff for more information, and also with your own research ideas.
David Howard is not
currently available to take on new students.
-
Scaling up a soft robotics simulator
Searching for a student with interests in robotic simulators and code optimisation - the project is to modify the Voxcad simualtion package to allow for larger-scale robots to be simulated. Voxcad models soft robots as a series of contiguous deformable voxels. Each voxel can be one of several types, e.g., contracting muscle, expanding muscle, soft tissue, hard (bone) support.
There are two main approaches to be investigated:
1) Split a large robot deterministically into a number of equal sections, simulate each section individually and create methods that allow the sections to effectively communicate their deformations to each other
2) Analyse the composition of a large robot, and create large continuous sections of a single type,which can be replaced with a larger-scale voxel of the same type.
We can also have a look at parallelising the simulator onto a high-performance cluster.
