Sarvapali (Gopal) Ramchurn is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Turing Fellow, and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He is the Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub and Co-Director of the Shell-Southampton Centre for Maritime Futures. He is also a Co-CEO of Empati Ltd, an AI startup working on decentralised green hydrogen technologies. His research is about the design of Responsible Artificial Intelligence for socio-technical applications including energy systems and disaster management. Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena is Professor of Medical Robotics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, where he leads the Mechatronics in Medicine Laboratory and the Applied Mechanics Division. He has been the Engineering Co-Director of the Hamlyn Centre, which is part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, since July 2020.

Researchers in Edinburgh have been awarded nearly £1m of funding to investigate how robots can be integrated into homes and care facilities of the future to support healthcare professionals. The money will go to the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics (ERC), a joint venture between Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. It comes from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of an overall £6.5m The ERC will develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to create four new robots to improve the delivery of healthcare and emergency response. They will include a TIAGO service robot that could assist healthcare professionals and family carers with physical and cognitive support.

The 2017 European Robotics Forum in Edinburgh brought together over 800 people from robotics academia and industry. In an effort to bridge the two, euRobotics hosted an Entrepreneurship and TechTransfer award. Startups from around Europe competed for top prizes in front of a panel of experts. The euRobotics Technology Transfer Award, now in its fourteenth year, showcases the impact of robotics research and puts the spotlight on successful technology transfer between science and industry. Innovations in robot tech and automation -- through the result of research and industry working together -- are eligible for the prize.