Projects per year
Personal profile
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 PhD students are:
- Dawood Basharat, co-supervised by Dr Helmut Hauser
- James Ward, co-supervised by Dr Peter Martin
- Gjosse Zijlstra, co-supervised by Prof Tom Scott
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.
Structured keywords and research groupings
- Cabot Institute City Futures Research
Keywords
- swarms
- ants
- social spiders
- robotics
- complex systems
- networks
- personality
- collective behaviour
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Network
Projects
- 1 Active
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T-B PHASE: Prosperity Partnership with Thales
Richards, A. G., Wilson, R. E., Johnson, A., Bullock, S., Lawry, J., Noyes, J. M., Hauert, S., Bode, N. W. F., Pitonakova, L., Kent, T., Crosscombe, M., Zanatto, D., Alkan, B., Drury, K. L., Hogg, E., Bonnell, W. D., Bennett, C., Clarke, C. E. M., Potts, M. W., Sartor, P. N., Harvey, D., Rayneau-Kirkhope, B., Galvin, K., Lam, J., Barden, E., Chattington, M., Radanovic, M., Morey, E. J., Ball, M., Hunt, E. R., Richards, A. G., Radanovic, M., Morey, E. J., Steane, V., Reed Edworthy, J. & Hart, S.
1/10/17 → 31/03/23
Project: Research
Research output
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British Science Festival 2021 Award Lecture for Digital Innovation: Robot Swarms
Hunt, E. R., 16 Jun 2021Research output: Non-textual form › Digital or Visual Products
Open Access -
Value at Risk strategies for robot swarms in hazardous environments
Hunt, E. R., Cullen, C. B. & Hauert, S., 12 Apr 2021, Proc. SPIE 11758: Unmanned Systems Technology XXIII. Nguyen, H. G., Muench, P. L. & Skibba, B. K. (eds.). Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), 117580M. (Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering; vol. 11758).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference Contribution (Conference Proceeding)
Open AccessFile1 Citation (Scopus)145 Downloads (Pure) -
A checklist for safe robot swarms
Hunt, E. R. & Hauert, S., 31 Jul 2020, In: Nature Machine Intelligence. 8 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review
Open AccessFile7 Citations (Scopus)146 Downloads (Pure)
Datasets
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Data for: Asymmetric ommatidia count and behavioural lateralization in the ant Temnothorax albipennis
Hunt, E. R. (Contributor), Dornan, C. (Creator), Sendova-Franks, A. (Contributor) & Franks, N. (Contributor), Mendeley Data, 21 Mar 2018
DOI: 10.17632/dfwwjmtmfh.1, https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/dfwwjmtmfh
Dataset
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Data from: Social interactions shape individual and collective personality in social spiders
Hunt, E. R. (Contributor), Mi, B. (Contributor), Fernandez, C. (Contributor), Wong, B. M. (Contributor), Pruitt, J. N. (Contributor) & Pinter-Wollman, N. (Contributor), Dryad, 14 Aug 2018
DOI: 10.5061/dryad.f78fc08, http://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.f78fc08
Dataset
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Data from: Ants show a leftward turning bias when exploring unknown nest sites
Hunt, E. R. (Contributor), O'Shea-Wheller, T. (Contributor), Albery, G. F. (Contributor), Bridger, T. H. (Contributor), Gumn, M. (Contributor) & Franks, N. R. (Contributor), Dryad, 28 Nov 2014
DOI: 10.5061/dryad.7rq20, http://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.7rq20
Dataset
Prizes
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3rd Place Equipment & Facilities EPSRC Photography Competition 2018
Hunt, Edmund R (Recipient), Wright, J. H. G. (Recipient) & Hauert, Sabine (Recipient), 3 Jun 2019
Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants
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British Science Festival 2021 Award Lecture Winner for Digital Innovation
Hunt, Edmund R (Recipient), 21 Jun 2021
Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants
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EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow
Hunt, Edmund R (Recipient), 4 Dec 2017
Prize: Prizes, Medals, Awards and Grants