Organizers

Madeleine Darbyshire is a PhD student at the University of Lincoln researching perception for precision weeding applications. In particular, her research focuses on bridging the gap between weed recognition performance on datasets and the recognition performance of real-world precision weeding systems. 

Laurence Roberts-Elliott is a Computer Science PhD student at Lincoln Agri-Robotics, University of Lincoln. Supervised by Dr. Gautham Das and Dr. Alan Millard. He is investigating methods of multi-robot coordination and dynamic spatial sampling for efficient and accurate multi-robot soil properties mapping, to enable precision agricultural land management for improved crop yields and reduced environmental impacts. This work is enabled by his development of lightweight abstract simulations of multi-agent systems for rapid experimentation. He has collaborated on research projects at national and international scale including as a Research Assistant on Innovate UK's Robot Highways project, and as an MSc by Research student at the University of Lincoln on the EU Horizon 2020 ILIAD project, supervised by Prof. Marc Hanheide and Dr. Manuel Fernández-Carmona.

Avgi is a PhD candidate, member of the FARSCOPE CDT program, at the University of Bristol and the University of West of England. Her research focuses on the cooperation and coordination of multi-agent systems. In particular, she focuses on the analysis of the dynamics of complex multi-agent systems and agents' learning mechanisms in environments with partial observability. Also, she is a member of the PROTEAS organization.

Georgios is a PhD candidate at the university of Bristol in the UK working in Hauert Lab and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). His research focuses on control algorithms for swarms of uncrewed aerial aircraft. Specifically, he works with UAVs to identify and fight wildfires in large areas such as California. Being driven by a passion about sustainability and eco friendly actions Georgios' dream is for roboticists and people to start thinking how humanity can live in balance with our natural environment. He has started amongst other roboticist PROTEAS team of robotic scientist who are eager to find like minded people to drive change and solve climate collapse.

Assistant Professor at ETH Zürich and head of the Environmental Robotics Lab.

Stefano Mintchev studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pisa and at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies (2005-​2010). He received his Ph.D. degree in Biorobotics in 2014 from The BioRobotics Institute (Italy). In the period 2014-​2018 he was postdoctoral researcher in Aerial Robotics at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL (Switzerland) with Prof. Floreano. In 2017 he co-​founded and contributed to the development of the start-​up Foldaway Haptics, where he served as CTO until March 2020.

At the moment, he is working on aerial robots for environmental sensing, collecting environmental DNA in dense vegetation, natural cavities, and other inaccessible natural locations. 

Sabine Hauert is Reader (Associate Professor) of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focuses on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Profoundly cross-disciplinary, Sabine works between Engineering Mathematics, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and Life Sciences. She’s PI or Co-I on more than 30M GBP in grant funding and has served on national and international committees, including the UK Robotics Growth Partnership, the Royal Society Working Group on Machine Learning and Data Community of Interest, and several IEEE boards. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL.

Sabine is also President and Co-founder of Robohub.org, and executive trustee of AIhub.org, two non-profits dedicated to connecting the robotics and AI communities to the public.

As an expert in science communication with 15 years of experience, Sabine is often invited to discuss the future of robotics and AI, including in the journals Science and Nature, at the European Parliament, and at the Royal Society. Her work has been featured in mainstream media including BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The Economist, TEDx, WIRED, and New Scientist.