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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/S23995/01
Title: PPA: The Hunter and the Hunted: From the Life Sciences to Engineering
Principal Investigator: Sharkey, Professor N
Other Investigators:
Sharkey, Dr A
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Billington Structures Limited
Department: Computer Science
Organisation: University of Sheffield
Scheme: PPE PreFEC
Starts: 19 May 2003 Ends: 18 January 2004 Value (£): 41,000
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
.Our aim is to engage children and their families in creative interaction with science, and engineering by exploiting the current public enthusiasm for robot competitions as well as the keen interest in the hunt and kill of the wild. The project would be delivered in a series of 45 family workshops at Magna, two special workshops for teachers, displays at the Cheltenham Festival of Science and the Tomorrows World Roadshow and a televised competition for TechnoGames (BBC2). The objective of each workshop will be for children and their families to construct autonomous robots to participate in the Hunter and the Hunted Competition:A brightly lit Prey robot will traverse a circular arena while a competitors Hunter robot will attempt to hunt and bump it. This will constitute a kill and the Prey will shriek loudly, change colour and quickly move away. The competitor's score will be the number of kills in a fixed time period. There will be Junior and Seniors levels of competition with levels of difficulty such as hiding places. A novel twist to the competition will be that the Prey robot will learn to get better over the course of a game.Our emphasis is on fostering curiosity to explore BioRobotics and the transfer of knowledge from the life science to engineering and vice versa. Only readily available low cost materials will be used to encourage further development in the home.
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Further Information:  
Organisation Website: http://www.shef.ac.uk