Brains on Board Project

In the Brains on Board project we are working with researchers at the University of Sheffield and Queen Mary, University of London to make this vision a reality. Our work includes research on honey bee behaviour, computational modelling of insect brains, experiments with autonomous robots in the lab and outdoors, and research into computationally efficient emulation of brain models on GPUs.

 Brains on Board is a programme grant funded by the EPSRC. It comprises the groups of James Marshall (University of Sheffield Computer Science, PI), Mikko Juusola (University of Sheffield Biology), Lars Chittka (Queen Mary, University of London Life Sciences), Andy Philippides and Thomas Nowotny (AI research group in Informatics) and Paul Graham (Life Sciences).

Through ActiveAI, an EPSRC-funded International Centre-to-Centre grant, Brains on Board has also partnered with an Australian cluster of excellence in insect neuroscience and behaviour [with the goal of developing a new class of controllers for problems in which insects excel but current AI/machine learning methods struggle. The Australian network comprises]: Macquarie University (Andrew Barron, Ken Cheng, Ajay Narendra); Flinders University (Karin Nordström) and the University of Queensland (Bruno van Swinderen). By combining cutting edge methods in insect neuroscience with computational and biorobotic modelling, we will both advance neuroscience and enable ActiveAI solutions which are efficient in learning and final network configuration, robust to real-world conditions and learn rapidly.