The Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) is an interdisciplinary division within the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. It is dedicated to researching robotics, artificial intelligence, systems engineering, and other related fields. The ORI is a subsidiary of the Department of Engineering Science. Information engineering Professor Nick Hawes is the current director of the ORI.

Sub-divisions (Labs)

The ORI is divided into five groups, each with a different specialisation. # Mobile Robotics Group (MRG): navigation systems, autonomous vehicles. This group is headed by

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, who is also the founder of Oxbotica. # Applied AI Lab (A2I): artificial intelligence and machine learning. # Dynamic Robot Systems Group (DRS): control,

motion planning Motion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used ...

, mapping, and

navigation Navigation is a field of study that focuses on the process of monitoring and controlling the motion, movement of a craft or vehicle from one place to another.Bowditch, 2003:799. The field of navigation includes four general categories: land navig ...

for dynamically moving robots. # Goal-Oriented Long-Lived Systems (GOALS): long-term autonomy and planning for robots operating for long periods of time in uncertain dynamic environments. # Estimation, Search & Planning Group (ESP): algorithm design for estimation, search and path planning of mobile robots. # Soft Robotics Lab: explores how compliance in the robot body can be exploited for dealing with task and environment uncertainty and for interacting with humans.

Activities

Among the ORI's projects are various autonomous vehicles as a part of the Mobile Robotics Group's Robotcar project. There have been various iterations of the hardware and software used in these experiments. The first vehicle used as a research platform by the Mobile Robotics Group was a Bowler Wildcat provided by

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in 2011. Since then, various

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s as well as other models (such as the

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) have been used as subsequent generations of research platforms.

References

{{University of Oxford Robotics organizations