Festival brings university research to life

The University of Bristol’s annual celebration of postgraduate research, Research Without Borders, opened its doors to allow Bristol’s public to see some of the cutting-edge scientific and technological research that is taking place at the University of Bristol. More than one hundred PhD students presented their projects to the public, filling the Colston Hall with fascinating activities like robot athletics, experiencing a night at a refugee camp and trying to pilot a drone.

One such student was Peter Thomas, who had built a tent that simulates night-time at a refugee camp without access to electricity. He had placed a smoke machine inside the tent to simulate cooking over a wood fire and the only source of light was a torch and two candles. His project involved looking into ways to provide energy access to refugee camps.

“Not many people are looking at energy in refugee camps. It’s a big challenge because it’s a very sensitive area and there are many challenges around funding too,” Thomas told Bristol24/7. “It’s majorly been donor-driven, but these projects take a couple of years to establish and the locations of these camps is very unstable.”

Kyriaki Vlachopoulou, an environmental consultant who had taken advantage of the free tickets to drop into the event, left the dark tent with an expression of shock. When asked how she felt inside, she said simply: “confined”.

“It’s sad that we still have people living in these conditions in a world where there’s so much. They are human beings,” she continued.

Kyriaki Vlachopoulou leaving the refugee camp tent, which was just one of the hands-on exhibits present

A little further along inside Colston Hall’s foyer, Cara Williamson was presenting research on improving the stability of drones. She believes drones will be introduced to the city soon, once some of the technology pitfalls are ironed out: currently, battery duration is not very good, making long missions impossible, and there are also complex winds that destabilise the drones.

However, there is an animal that lives in the city that is able to navigate these wind flows and use them to save energy, and this is why Cara and a group of ornithologist and engineers have put GPS backpacks on 11 seagulls in Bristol. The GPS both tracks the animal and can also know when it is flapping or soaring. This way, drones can copy the gulls’ strategies.

The project started two-and-a-half years ago, but legislation must catch up in order to allow drones to fly in the city. Cara hopes that they can provide the technology for when it is ready: “We hope drones can help in tasks like surveillance or emergency services. They could also monitor traffic and be used for important deliveries. Bristol is a great city to conduct this research, in that we have got a big gull population and its wind patterns are very interesting.”

Cara Williamson is part of the Urban Gull project, using gulls’ flight patterns to improve drone technology

Another eye-catching technology project was being discussed by six PhD students from Bristol Robotics Laboratory, who are looking at how to make it safer for humans to interact with robots. Soft robotics emerged almost 30 years ago, but until recently its usefulness has not been explored. Robots are usually very rigid, and this is stopping them from working alongside humans.

Student Hsing Yu Chen explained that though the inside of a robot is rigid, the outside can be made soft – “so you can understand, they are like Baymax from Big Hero 6!” he joked.

For the moment, their soft robots perform very simple tasks such as moving across sand and passing a ball, but in the future they aim to make them better and more complex.

‘Rubik’ is one of the soft robots developed by the PhD students.

While technology projects made up a good proportion of the research on display, postgraduate research students at the university play a vital role in developing key advancements to tackle issues surrounding health, the environment, entertainment and engineering.

Debbie Daniels and Katherine MacInnes, two third year PhD students, were proudly demonstrating their lab-grown blood. To start, they use stem cells, which then undergo a transformation until they become fully-formed red blood cells.

Debbie said: “We hope that one day this will help out niche groups of patients who find it very difficult or sometimes impossible to find blood matches. There are people with very rare blood types and hopefully we’ll be able to have rare blood banks that they can go to.”

The pair say they think they are very lucky in their field of research, because the majority of scientific research is prepared for the far future; the stem cells they are growing will be clinically trialled next year.

“Talking about it with this kind of audience is great for opening people’s eyes to it and listening to their concerns and questions,” said Debbie.

Debbie Daniels is co-developing lab-grown blood to help those with rare blood types

The reaction was good from the local audience who visited the festival. Hundreds of people crossed the threshold to find out more about the projects and talk to the researchers. James Stuart, a public health doctor visiting for the afternoon, told Bristol24/7 it was great to learn about topics you know nothing about: “It’s a whole lot of new research and it’s nice to encourage people as well as being interesting. I think I should have come for longer.”

Find out more about current research projects at the University of Bristol by visiting www.bristol.ac.uk/research