Question: heyy :) your job seems very interesting, i was just wondering what it takes to be able to do that line of work and also what have you designed. Thanks :D

Alan Winfield answered on 19 Mar 2011:

Thanks Aaron – glad you think what I do is interesting. One of the great things about modern robotics is that lots of different subjects need to be involved. The core skills for robotics are still mechanical, electronic and software engineering, but if your main interest is – for example – psychology then you could get involved in robotics – such as the study of human robot interaction. So, almost any science and engineering subject is relevant to robotics. So I think what it takes to do robotics is a science background, curiosity and enthusiasm, and a willingness to work with other scientists and engineers.

Over the years I’ve designed lots of things (mostly not on my own but in teams) and it would be hard to list them here. I wrote about one robot I helped to design, called the LinuxBot, here http://ias.im/35.103

These days I mostly design experiments with robots in them – and my students actually design the robots to go in the experiments (which is wonderful for me!). You can read about one experiment that is using robots to try and help us understand how behaviours evolve as they are imitated here: http://sites.google.com/site/artcultproject/

Thanks for a great question!