About Us
Co-Chairs
David Lane
Entrepreneur and founding director of Edinburgh Centre for Robotics
Professor and Founding Director in the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, a £120M joint venture between Heriot-Watt and Edinburgh Universities training 100 PhDs in the EPSRC ROBOTARIUM national equipment facility. Previously he established Heriot-Watt’s Ocean Systems Laboratory with an international reputation in marine robotics, publishing nearly 300 cited publications with international funding from the UK, EU, US and Japan.
Alongside being a ‘serial entrepreneur’ David sits on a range of advisory boards and has been elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Institution of Engineering and Technology, Society of Underwater Technology and Royal Geographical Society. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to Engineering in the 2016 Queen’s New Year Honours list.
Paul Clarke
Independent Advisor to Government, Industry and Start-ups
In November 2020, Paul Clarke stepped down as Chief Technology Officer at Ocado, having joined the business in 2006 and led the sharp end of Ocado’s innovation factory since early 2012. Paul is passionate about the recipes for successful invention, innovation and disruption, which in his experience are all about embracing non-linearity, mess, uncertainty, intersectional thinking, unconventionality, intuition and leaps of faith. He believes building a successful innovation factory is all about the people, culture, creativity, leadership and vision rather than the underlying technologies, and he has spent much of his career being a piece of disruptive grit in a number of different oysters, trying to help people see what they can’t see and trying to inspire teams to do things they never dreamed possible. His particular areas of focus are the opportunities created by the alchemical blend of data, AI, synthetic environments/ digital twins, smart machines and living labs at a national and potentially planetary scale. He sits on a number of government and industry advisory boards including the AI Council, Robotics Growth Partnership (co-chair), Innovation Expert Group, ISCF Future Flight, ISCF RAI Extreme Environments and the National Food Strategy, whilst at the same time advising a number of exciting start-ups.
Members
David Bisset
Robotics consultant
Career roboticist, Chair of KTN’s RAI SIG Advisory Board since 2015. Co-author of 2014 RAS strategy. Formerly head of mobile robotics research at the University of Kent. With Dyson 1998-2002 before setting up as a consultant in robotics and embedded systems, assistive technology and technology transfer. Regular speaker and leader of European robotics programmes (EUROP, Horizon 2020, SPARC, RockEU and RockEU2). Co-author of authoritative 2018 RAS Foresight report for Lloyds Register Foundation.
Rob Buckingham
RACE, UKAEA
Executive Director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the first Head of RACE, the centre for Remote Applications in Challenging Environments. Before re-joining the UKAEA, Rob co-founded OC Robotics which developed and commercialised snake-arm™ robots. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology. He received an OBE for services to robotics engineering in the 2021 New Year Honours.
Sabine Hauert
Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Robohub
Professor of Swarm Engineering at University of Bristol, specialising in swarm engineering across scales, from nanomedicine to treat cancer to robot swarms for intralogistics or environmental monitoring. Founder of robohub.org and aihub.org charities in science communication. Her work has featured in BBC, CNN, Guardian, Economist, TEDx, Wired and New Scientist.
Previously worked in the USA at MIT and Carnegie Mellon and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
James Kell
Jacobs
Robotics innovator, tech specialist and industrial end user. James’ expertise spans across technology applications, advocating and developing new technologies for real world application. He is a regular collaborator across academia and business community, including with the National Robotics Network, and recently leading a collaboration with Nottingham University and other parties to rethink maintenance solutions and developed remote repair tools, swarm technologies and snake robots.
Barry Lennox
University of Manchester and RAS Network Chair
Professor of Applied Control and Nuclear Engineering Decommissioning at The University of Manchester and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is Chair of the RAS Network, the UK’s network for RAS academic community. He holds a Royal Academy Chair in Emerging Technologies and is the Co-Director of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration (RAICo), which aims to develop technology that will lead to the greater adoption of robotics in the nuclear decommissioning industry. He is Co-Director of the University of Manchester’s Centre for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and has been responsible for the deployment of a range of robotic systems into active facilities in the UK and overseas .
Samia Nefti-Meziani
Salford University and National Robotics Network
Professor of Artificial intelligence and Robotics and Cofounder of the National Robotics Network. Founder and Director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems and Advanced Robotics at Salford and led the newly £13M North of England Robotics Innovation Centre, co-funded by EU and Research England, to develop the UK’s cross-sector intelligent automation and robotics industry. She is currently the Co-Director of the EPSRC Hub in Robotics and Future AI for Space Technology (FAIR-SPACE). She has a well-established track record and has published extensively in top impact factor journals in soft/hard robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Through the large UK and European research programmes, she has developed wider practical cross-sectorial technologies and has pioneered their use in many sectors including Food, Agriculture, Nuclear, Transport, Aerospace and Healthcare. She regularly appears on TV and radio and she is cofounder of the National Robotics Network.
Rob Richardson
Leeds University
Academic and network owner. Director of Institute of Design, Robotics and Optimisation and Director of £4m Leeds University robotics facility. Current focus on surgical, wellbeing, safety and security applications. Former UK MOD Grand Challenge finalist 2008 and won prizes for use of robotic technology in Great Pyramid discover in Giza in 2011. Formerly Chair of the RAS Network from 2019-2023. Professor of Robotics and a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.