Merihan is doing her final year of her Robotics and Autonomous Systems PhD at the University of Bristol. Working at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, her PhD focuses on swarm robotics, which is a field concerned with using many robots working together to achieve a task. She particularly looks into building expressive swarm systems to enhance how humans can interact with robot swarms. For this purpose, she has designed and built a swarm of robots called MOSAIX, made of 100 robot Tiles, that aims to help humans in social tasks such as decision-making and brainstorming. The Tiles are 4-inch touchscreens-on-wheels robots, and Merihan has already used the robots with members of the public on multiple occasions, such as in a shopping mall to collect and communicate opinions on climate change from shoppers. Merihan obtained her Master’s degree in Robotics from the University of Bristol in 2019, where she built a system, Robotic Canvas, that enables a human and a swarm of robots to collaborate to create art. Prior to joining University of Bristol, Merihan worked in General Electric in software development and product ownership roles in the UK, UAE and Saudi Arabia. 

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Talk - Swarm Robotics ft. Data: Building expressive swarms for data communication

Swarm robotics is concerned with using many robots that work together to achieve a certain task. Those robots usually collect and generate a lot of data, but how can this data be expressed in an intuitive manner for human operators to understand? This talk presents expressive robot swarms, which are swarm robots that have the capability of receiving and conveying data to enhance human-swarm interaction. There will also be a short demo with a new swarm robotic system of our design, called MOSAIX, made of a swarm of robot Tiles.

See Merihan Alhafnawi's talk recording.