Question: Why did you take this area of work?

Alan Winfield answered on 16 Mar 2011:

For me ‘this area of work’ means robotics!

Like many things in life there was alot of chance involved. Although I have always been fascinated by robots I didn’t actively want to study them until I came to UWE 20 years ago. I was lucky then because firstly I had a chance to set up a new research group, and secondly I met 2 other people who were also interested in robots. Together we started the robotics lab. We were also lucky because we managed to win the money (grants) to do robot research projects – without the funding the lab would have been very short lived.

Then, during the last 20 years my interest in robotics has changed, so that now I’m much more interested in basic scientific questions, like what is intelligence, how do animals evolve, how does culture emerge and so on, and use robots to try and answer (in a small way) those questions. So what makes me want to study robots now is a deep interest in some of the big questions of life.