Image of robot ‘listening’ to an unborn child wins photography award
An image of a robot ‘listening’ to an unborn child has won the ‘People’ category in this year’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Science Photography Competition. “The Greatest Discovery” was taken by Sandy Spence at the Department of Computer Science at Aberystwyth University and features mother to be Ayesha Jones and the Department’s iCub humanoid robot. The research of the Intelligent Robotics group at the Department of Computer Science is inspired by the development of infants during the very early stages of life. Patricia Shaw, a lecturer in Computer Science and a member of the Intelligent Robotics Group, said: “We work with psychologists and neuroscientists to understand how children develop and learn, even from before birth. “In the work we have done so far, we have developed a model that enables the iCub robot to learn how to coordinate what it is sensing to the motor movements it can make. “In the photograph, we wanted to tell a story to the general ...