Pudding Seminar: Chapa Sirithunge (SCR), 'Navigating the Physical World: The Essential Role of Robots'

Please note this talk will take place in the Cynthia Beerbower Room

Abstract: In exploring the world, embodied robots demonstrate that a physical body is as crucial as intelligence. While traditional robotics has focused primarily on computational intelligence, recent advances highlight the importance of physical embodiment. A robot’s body influences its interactions with the environment, enabling it to perform tasks and navigate spaces in ways purely computational systems cannot. This talk will delve into the significance of a body in organisms, illustrating how the design of a robot's body can be optimised to exploit environmental affordances. By integrating both physical and cognitive capabilities, embodied robots achieve more effective and versatile functionality, paving the way for innovative applications in various fields. This understanding underscores the synergy between a robot's physical form and its intelligence, leading to more capable and adaptive robotic systems.

Biography: Dr. Sirithunge received her bachelors and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka. She joined the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral research associate in 2022. She currently works as a Marie-Curie fellow at the University of Cambridge. She has been a postdoctoral affiliate at Newnham College since 2023. Her research interests are embodied social robots, bio-inspired soft robots and human-robot interaction.

All staff, students, senior members and alumnae are very warmly invited to attend the Pudding Seminars. Talks usually last between 20-25 minutes, followed by time for questions, comments and discussion before we finish at 1.50pm, to allow people to get to 2pm appointments. Please note that coffee and cake will be available from 1 o’clock with the seminar starting promptly at 1.15pm. Details of all our seminars can be found at: https://newn.cam.ac.uk/research/pudding-seminars