In June, an enthusiastic turnout of like-minded developers, researchers, educators and roboticists attended and successfully completed the 2019 MiRo Developer Workshop!
Hosted at the University of Sheffield, the attendees were able to meet and work with CqR founders Professor Tony Prescott, Sebastian Conran and Ben Mitchinson including many of the CQR and Sheffield Robotics technical and research staff who were on hand to support the two day workshop. So how did it go?
Day 1 was all about MiRo, it’s birth and it’s future. Sebastian talked about the ideas and industrial design behind MiRo which was then followed by Professor Prescott’s session on MiRo’s biomimetic brain-based control system and the potential for animal-like robots in education and therapy. Day 1 then finished off with Dr Mitchinson’s discussion on MiRo’s technical capabilities and functionality.
During day 2, our new MiRo students were tasked with applying their learnings from day one. The students were put into groups and worked together to develop new MiRo functionality. To everybody’s delight, new functionalities emerged as the teams eagerly created new skills for MiRo from ball-playing to sentiment-analysing, including many more! This valuable session also helped the teams to think about future development and collaboration opportunities. We really can’t wait to hear about any progress from this session alone!
To round off a great event, there was a social gathering to celebrate the coming together of the MiRo community. The CqR team are delighted to have been part of such a wonderful event which brought together MiRo users from a background of different skills, objectives and ideas. We hope that our friends left armed with the latest MiRo expertise including plenty of new ideas for it’s future use. We’re confident that not only will this further enhance their experience of MiRo within their school, health care establishment or research but it will also help them and many others to advance their objectives and support the use of companion robots for the future.
If you missed this years session, don’t fret, we’ll be hosting another in 2020 so watch this space! In the meantime, here’s what our students said about the workshop and why you need to save a spot at the 2020 workshop.
‘A huge thank you to everyone at @CqRMiRo and to @tonyjprescott for a brilliant 2 days, learning about the new MiRo-E robot. An informative and thoroughly enjoyable time’.
‘Great day meeting folk interested in these folk! @CqRMiRo’
‘Wonderful first day at the MiRo developer workshop! Excited to discuss collaborating with @scadhu (researcher of machines and love!) and meet Carl Clement (founder of @EmotionRobotics). Watch this space!’
‘Great two-days spent in @SheffUniEng and @ShefRobotics at the MiRo developer workshop. Together with Carl Clement (@EmotionRobotics), @leda_ptr and others, we worked on sentiment-driven reactions from speech. Exciting stuff! Thank you @tonyjprescott and @CqRMiRo!’