Leiden University: Robotics and AI in archaeological theory and practice

What can Robotics and AI bring to archaeological theory and practice? In return, how can archaeology contribute to the developments in robotics and AI research? Colleagues tackled these questions at an event organised by the Faculty of Archaeology and sponsored by SAILS.

Plentiful results
During the event, domain knowledge was shared between 15 participants and questions were unpacked around cognitive learning, swarm robotics, haptics and wearables within the context of archaeology. The results are plentiful. For instance, it became clear that the discipline of archaeology can provide challenging analogue environments -as emerging robotics systems require extensive tests before deployment for diverse settings, such as space missions. At the end of the event, the researchers agreed to further collaboration, and potential next steps were identified.

The two-day event took place on the 8th and 9th of December with contributions from the Netherlands (Leiden University, TUDelft), Italy (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia), Turkey (Bogazici University, Middle East Technical University) and the USA (University of Central Florida).