Thursday 21st November 2024
The Pipebots Academic event took place at Factory 2050 at the University of Sheffield on Thursday 21st November 2024. The event was well attended with over 20 academics from institutions across the UK and Europe joining the Pipebots team for a day of presentations and discussions.
The story of Pipebots
The day kicked off with Programme Director, Professor Kirill Horoshenkov welcoming participants to the event and presenting an overview of the Pipebots programme grant, sharing the story of Pipebots and highlighting the key technical achievements of Pipebots over the last 6 years. In his presentation, Kirill shared the Pipebots timeline and explained how the different research themes addressed the research challenges including sensing, autonomous control, navigation, ruggedisation and talked about how the team worked together to integrate the technology developed in Pipebots.
Research Challenges
We were pleased to welcome a range of speakers to participate in the event. Dr Tim Rogers from the University of Sheffield gave a really interesting talk on Machine Learning and AI and Prof. Emma Hart from Edinburgh Napier University gave a talk on her perspective of the challenges in robotics. Chair of the Pipebots Steering Committee, Prof. Mike Lowe from Imperial College London gave a fascinating talk on sensing and Prof. Nicole Metje from the Pipebots team at the University of Birmingham talked about challenges in buried infrastructure. Following the talks, there was a panel discussion with lots of interesting questions from participants and the discussions continued over lunch.
Discussion Sessions
After lunch participants broke out into groups to discuss the research challenges presented during the morning session. There was a lot of discussion and ideas about the research challenges in the areas of Machine Learning and AI, Robotics, Sensing and Buried Infrastructure and participants had the opportunity to contribute their ideas and suggestions for future research grants in these key areas. The discussion sessions were very productive and gave the Pipebots team a lot to think about for future research and the next steps for Pipebots.
The talks and presentations were very well received and participants gave a lot detailed comments and feedback on future research challenges and potential grant applications. The event has been extremely valuable and helpful for the Pipebots team, and we would like to thank the speakers, participants and the Pipebots team for their continued support and collaboration.