Question: What would be your dream project, putting budgets and constraints aside?

Ted Burke answered on 3 Mar 2019:

I’m lucky that I’m able to work on a lot of my own ideas in my job as a lecturer. The main thing that prevents me from pursuing some of my bigger dream projects is just the lack of time rather than money. If I had as much time as I wanted to work on anything at all, the two things that spring to mind are:

1. Build a giant robot swarm. If you look up “robot swarm” on YouTube, you’ll see some incredible projects that people are working on. I’ve done some work on it, but if I had more time I’d love to build a big swarm of robots to see how it behaves. These kind of robots might have a big impact on human health and quality of life in the future, but right now there are lots of more basic and interesting technical challenges.

2. I’d love to build what I call a neuro-ocular interface – a system that lets a human control a computer using eye movements and electrical signals from the brain or elsewhere in the body. I do some work in this area now, but if I could focus on it full-time I think that would be a really exciting thing to build!