With just a week to go until this year's Imperial Festival, final preparations are underway to launch the UK's largest robotics network at the event.

I-Cub was a popular attraction at Imperial Festival 2013

The Robotics Network will bring together all the basic and applied robotics research being carried out by Imperial College London researchers. The network involves more than 15 separate groups from the departments of aeronautics, bioengineering, computing, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. The research areas include: mechatronics systems design and control; autonomous systems and artificial intelligence; medical and rehabilitation robotics; computer vision; neuromechanics, and social robotics.

A talk, The Future of Robotics, will launch the new network at 5pm on Friday 9 May and there will be a series of café talks running across both days of the Festival.

Bio-inspired jumping robot developed by Dr Mirko Kovac

To mark this exciting development, a dedicated Robot Zone has been created for the first time at the Festival. The zone is a place where you can explore all the incredible research being carried out at Imperial. You can speak with scientists who are using robotics to tackle a wide range of real-world issues:

• Improving rehabilitation rates in children with motor development issues and physical injuries
• Developing virtual reality surgical devices to enable operations to be conducted remotely
• Working on robotic muscles that have the power to lift a human being

Dr Jenna Stevens-Smith, from Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, said: “It is very exciting to be launching the Robotics Network at Imperial Festival. I think Festival visitors will be fascinated to see all the ways that robots can make a difference to the way we live – often in the most unexpected ways.”