Expertise

Sheffield’s wealth of robotics expertise, and its long history of making, are ideally suited to the development of collaborative robotics.

Talking to children about robots — Engaging with the public to understand societal attitudes and address concerns about our future with robots

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The nature of collaborative robotic systems requires consideration of a wide range of factors in their development, including the robot platform, processes, interfaces, control systems, safety, and human factors.

Our work in this area pulls together the wide-ranging expertise in Sheffield, to not only develop the robotic technologies required to support these processes, but also to consider the impact this technology will have on users, and how we can support their needs.

An introduction to the Collaborative Robotics Group

Safety and technology acceptance are two of the main barriers to adoption of collaborative robotics. Our multidisciplinary approach considers both the technical and human factors required to develop trust in the technology.

James Law

Group lead

Under the umbrella of Sheffield Robotics, the Collaborative Robotics Group brings together members and facilities from the University of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam University, and the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. Together we possess expertise in foundational research through to the development of industry demonstrators.

Areas of expertise

Responsible innovation

Stakeholder engagement is key in ensuring scientific and technological research and development addresses the needs and concerns of all involved. We employ and develop participatory design techniques and public engagement activities to understand stakeholder attitudes and shape our research to build confidence and trust in the technology.

A child draws on paper while taking part in a workshop activity — Running educational activities to engage future scientists and engineers

Intuitive interfaces

To enable ease of use we are developing new, intuitive, interfaces for interacting with robots. This includes language-independent graphical information, speech and dialogue interfaces, augmented reality, uncomplicated programming interfaces, and intuitive robot behaviours.

Cognitive robotics and AI

Developing new approaches to robot control based on human cognition and novel computational algorithms to enable more complex robot behaviours.

Human factors

Sociological and psychological approaches (including user surveys and participant experiments) to validate technology and study the impact on acceptance, trust, and attitudes towards robots.