Eden Attenborough
Research Interests
Sensor fusion and localization
Presentations
- “Natural Language Understanding based on RAG towards a General-Purpose Service Robot” (poster) – AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference 2024: Robots in Action [July 2024] – Norwich, UK.
- “Exploration of LLM-Enhanced State-Machine function-calls for Planning Robot Actions” (oral) – AgriFoRwArdS CDT Summer School: Robotic Phenotyping [July 2024] – Wageningen, The Netherlands.
- “Natural Language Understanding based on RAG towards a General-Purpose Service Robot” (poster) – AgriFoRwArdS CDT Summer School: Robotic Phenotyping [July 2024] – Wageningen, The Netherlands.
About me
My interest in robotics was sparked at the robotics club in my school, which was participated in the RoboCup Junior competition. Our team participated in the international finals in Hefei, China in 2015. Before starting in Lincoln I completed an integrated masters (MComp) degree in Computer Science at UEA. I was also the president of the Computer Science society at UEA from 2022-23.
I’m looking forward to learning under experienced teachers in Lincoln and studying for my PhD at UEA- I’m also looking forward to help introduce technologies to aid in labour shortages in the agricultural sector, and help build a better world in an ethical and sustainable way.
Outside of robotics I enjoy tinkering with servers on my personal homelab, and going for long walks in the Norfolk countryside.
MSc Project
Natural Language Understanding based on RAG towards a General-Purpose Service Robot
Making a robot capable of understanding commands (given by non-expert operators) requiring a wide range of different abilities and execute/respond according to its context, capabilities and knowledge about the workspace.
PhD Project
Integration of Communication, Positioning, Navigation, and Timing for Agri-robots
The UK agricultural sector is struggling to attract skilled workers to carryout essential agricultural tasks that were once saturated before the UK left the EU. On top of this current global events such as war and climate change have had a catastrophic effect on the agricultural supply chain. To help combat the shortages in labour the UK agricultural sector needs automate the farming role that have labour shortages. This is especially pertinent in roles such as crop harvesting where labour shortages are declining at an alarming rate. This could easily be rectified by replacing this labour shortage with autonomous harvesting machines.
A key issue in this area of automation is that some crops block out the mobile network signals that the robot uses to navigate from waypoint to waypoint. A solution to this is to develop a private 4G/5G mobile network solution to integrate communication, positioning, navigation, and timing (CPNT) to provide accurate CPNT for the robot to navigate from location to location.
A 4G private network will be firstly implemented to provide basic mobile coverage in no signal agri-fields scenario. Then we will integrate GNSS RTK services in application level. The next step is to use USRP B210 as 4G/5G base station to carry RTK correction data in the communication spectrum. Indoor positioning services using mobile signal strength, ToA, TDoA will be implemented afterwards. Fusion of sensor data to further calibrate positioning accuracy will be design and implemented.
Eden’s PhD project is being carried out under the primary supervision of Dr Edwin Ren.