Faculty

Patricia A. Vargas

Founding Director of the Robotics Lab

Associate Professor/Reader in Computer Science and Robotics

MACS/Heriot-watt University

My main research interests are in Neurorobotics, Computational Neuroscience, Rehabilitation Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Evolutionary Robotics, Swarm robotics and Biologically-Inspired Controllers.

Christian Dondrup

Deputy Director of the Robotics Lab

Assistant Professor

MACS/Heriot-watt University

My primary research interests are Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, (Human-aware) Navigation & Localisation for Mobile Robots, Behaviour Generation for HRI and Robots in Healthcare.

Ruth S. Aylett

Professor in Computer Science

MACS/Heriot-watt University

My main research interests are intelligent graphical characters, affective agent models, human-robot interaction, and interactive narrative.

David W. corne

Professor in Computer Science

MACS/Heriot-watt University

I develop new ideas for solving difficult problems in optimization and machine learning, and tries his best to do useful things with those ideas.

 

mauro Dragone

Assistant Professor

EPS/Heriot-watt University

Dr. Dragone’s expertise includes robotics, wireless sensor networks and software engineering. He worked in a number of EU IoT projects and led RUBICON (fp7rubicon.cu), building integrated robotic and IoT systems.

Ekaterina Komendantskaya

Associate Professor

MACS/Heriot-watt University

My main research interests are in the areas of Logic and Verification, including verification of neural networks and other machine learning algorithms, and design of novel programming languages and tools for AI verification. I lead the Lab for AI and Verification (www.LAIV.uk) at Heriot-Watt. 

Xianwen Kong

Assistant Professor

EPS/Heriot-watt University

My research interests include mechanisms, robotics, mechatronics and their industrial, biomedical and renewable energy application at the macro-, micro- and nano-scales.

mICHAEL lONES

Associate Professor in Computer Science

MCAS/Heriot-watt University

I am interested in how ideas from biology can be applied to Robotics and Computer Science. My current research focus is on artificial biochemical networks, evolutionary algorithms, and medical applications.

Robert Stewart

Assistant Professor

MCAS/Heriot-watt University

Interests include development of parallel functional programming languages for HPC, embedded and FPGA systems with a focus on reliability, verification, performance, and application of resource constrained languages for autonomous robotics systems.

Nicholas K. Taylor

Professor in Computer Science

MCAS/Heriot-watt University

My research is undertaken through the Pervasive, Ubiquitous and Mobile Applications (PUMA) Lab, the Intelligent Systems Lab (ISL) and the Robotics Lab which is part of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.