Dr Edmund Hunt
BSc (Lond) ARCS, MPhil (Oxon), PhD (Bris)
Expertise
Current positions
Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow
School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
I am a Research Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering (2021-26), focused on swarm robotics for infrastructure monitoring. I have a background in complexity sciences and collective animal behaviour which I draw on for inspiration in my work.
Deploying swarms into the 'real world' is challenging, and my approach to solving this involves using smaller numbers of robots (e.g. 4-10) than one might usually think of as a 'swarm'. More sophisticated, ROS-based robots can navigate their environment effectively and coordinate with teammates.
My experimental work is at Fenswood Farm, Long Ashton. I also sometimes visit the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. My university home is in the Department of Engineering Mathematics, and I am affiliated with the Collective Dynamics group.
My current postdoctoral research associates are:
- Medhi Sobhani, part of the Human-Robot Satisficing Trust ('HuRST') project
My current PhD students are:
- Zachary Madin, co-supervised by Prof Jonathan Lawry
- James Ward, co-supervised by Dr Ryan McConville
- Gjosse Zijlstra, co-supervised by Prof Karen Aplin
- Connor York, co-supervised by Dr Paul O'Dowd
- Dawood Basharat, co-supervised by Dr Helmut Hauser
- Jay Hamill, co-supervised by Dr Paul O'Dowd
In 2017 I spent a year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department, working on animal social networks. I returned to Bristol as an EPSRC Doctoral Prize fellow and then a UK Intelligence Community fellow, before taking up my current RAEng fellowship. My PhD research was concerned with the exploration and decision-making behaviour of house-hunting Temnothorax ants, within the field of behavioural ecology and complexity sciences, as an EPSRC-funded PhD student. I was interested in how the behavioural interactions of individual worker ants allows collective problem-solving abilities to emerge.
In between science degrees, I studied economics and worked in financial regulation (risk management). The theme of optimising risk-return trade-offs have been recurrent in my work with animal behaviour and robotics.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Satisficing Trust over Time in Human-Robot Teams
Role
Co-Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School for Policy StudiesDates
01/02/2023 to 31/01/2026
Prosperity Partnership with Thales
Principal Investigator
Role
Collaborator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Computer ScienceDates
01/10/2017 to 31/03/2023
Publications
Recent publications
13/02/2024Exploring the Use of Terrestrial Robots for Atmospheric Electricity Measurement
Journal of Physics: Conference Series
Steps Towards Satisficing Distributed Dynamic Team Trust
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series
An Empirical Method for Benchmarking Multi-Robot Patrol Strategies in Adversarial Environments
Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2023