Dr Edmund Hunt
BSc (Lond) ARCS, MPhil (Oxon), PhD (Bris)
Expertise
Current positions
Lecturer in Robotics
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
I am a Lecturer in Robotics and Research Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering (2021-26), focused on swarm robotics for environmental monitoring. I have a background in complexity sciences and collective animal behaviour which I draw on for inspiration in my work.
Deploying swarms into the 'real world' is challenging, and my approach to solving this involves using smaller numbers of robots (e.g. 4-10) than one might usually think of as a 'swarm'. More sophisticated, ROS-based robots can navigate their environment effectively and coordinate with teammates.
My group carries out experimental work in indoor environments on the university campus and in the city, and outside at locations such as the Bristol harbourside and Fenswood Farm, Long Ashton. I am affiliated with the Collective Dynamics research group with the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology.
My current postdoctoral research associates are:
- Nicola Webb, part of the Human-Robot Satisficing Trust ('HuRST') project
My current PhD students are:
- Zachary Madin, co-supervised by Prof Jonathan Lawry
- James Ward, co-supervised by Dr Ryan McConville
- Gjosse Zijlstra, co-supervised by Prof Karen Aplin
- Connor York, co-supervised by Dr Paul O'Dowd
- Dawood Basharat, co-supervised by Dr Helmut Hauser
- Jay Hamill, co-supervised by Dr Paul O'Dowd
In 2017 I spent a year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department, working on animal social networks. I returned to Bristol as an EPSRC Doctoral Prize fellow and then a UK Intelligence Community fellow, before taking up my current RAEng fellowship. My PhD research was concerned with the exploration and decision-making behaviour of house-hunting Temnothorax ants, within the field of behavioural ecology and complexity sciences, as an EPSRC-funded PhD student. I was interested in how the behavioural interactions of individual worker ants allows collective problem-solving abilities to emerge. In between science degrees, I studied economics and worked in financial regulation (risk management). The theme of optimising risk-return trade-offs have been recurrent in my work with animal behaviour and robotics.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Satisficing Trust over Time in Human-Robot Teams
Role
Co-Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School for Policy StudiesDates
01/02/2023 to 31/01/2026
Prosperity Partnership with Thales
Principal Investigator
Role
Collaborator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Computer ScienceDates
01/10/2017 to 31/03/2023
Publications
Recent publications
21/05/2024Collective Anomaly Perception During Multi-Robot Patrol
SAC '24: Proceedings of the 39th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing
Exploring the Use of Terrestrial Robots for Atmospheric Electricity Measurement
Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Shaping Multi-Robot Patrol Performance with Heterogeneity in Individual Learning Behavior
2024 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL)
Steps Towards Satisficing Distributed Dynamic Team Trust
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series
Swift Trust in Mobile Ad Hoc Human-Robot Teams
Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS '24)