UMass Amherst: Department of Computer Science

Robin arrived at Edinburgh University as a Lecturer in 1965 and spent the next 20 years establishing one of the first world-class research groups in Robotics in Europe. He did visionary work in Robotics involving the integration of multi-modal sensing (including vision) into robotic control, and developed techniques for modeling and spatial reasoning about geometric objects. This work, which started soon after he arrived in Edinburgh, anticipated functional and higher order programming by over a decade. PoP-2 was the main language used by researchers in Artificial Intelligence in Britain during the 1970's. While on the faculty at Edinburgh University, he played a major role in keeping the fledging field of Robotics alive in Britain after the Lighthill report on Artificial Intelligence precipitated a major decrease of funding in this area.