
Dr Edmund Hunt
BSc (Lond) ARCS, MPhil (Oxon), PhD (Bris)
Expertise
Current positions
Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow
Department of Engineering Mathematics
Contact
Media contact
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Research interests
I am a Research Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering (2021-26), focused on swarm robotics for infrastructure 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 experimental work is at Fenswood Farm, Long Ashton. I also sometimes visit the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. My university home is in the Department of Engineering Mathematics, and I am affiliated with the Collective Dynamics group.
My current PhD students are:
- Dawood Basharat, co-supervised by Dr Helmut Hauser
- James Ward, co-supervised by Dr Peter Martin
- Gjosse Zijlstra, co-supervised by Prof Tom Scott
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
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
12/04/2021Value at Risk strategies for robot swarms in hazardous environments
Proc. SPIE 11758
British Science Festival 2021 Award Lecture for Digital Innovation
Evolutionary Stress Factors for Adaptable Robot 'Personalities'
GECCO '20: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
Plastic ‘personalities’ for effective field swarms
UKRAS20 Conference: “Robots into the real world” Proceedings
SPIDER
ALIFE 2020