Adam A. Stokes
Welcome to my personal webpage, where you’ll find a collection of essays on topics I’m actively trying to understand. These are not static publications but live documents that evolve over time as I think in public, refine my views, and respond to new ideas and conversations. If you wish to discuss anything I’ve written, or wish to engage with me on a project or a talk, then please contact me. My primary email address is a.a.stokes@ed.ac.uk.I am Full Professor and Head of the Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Edinburgh and a research-led advisor on robotics, AI, and bioinspired innovation. Outside of the academy I am an active entrepreneur and consultant. I work with organisations to stress-test assumptions about emerging technologies and chart practical paths from prototype to deployment. These essays capture the thinking behind that work—I offer them as a public resource and also as an invitation to collaborate.
My most recent post is shown below, see all essays here.
(Re)Designing the Tree of Robotic Life: What can robotic system designers learn from evolutionary biology?
The tree of life forms a concise snapshot of the history, and linkages between, all life forms on Earth. Another way to look at this diagram is to imagine what the world would have been like if history had played out differently. If the evolutionary game was run again, how would the same fundamental building blocks have combined, given different selective pressures and exogenous shocks? This research question exists at the intersection of evolutionary biology, engineering, and design, and over the last few years I have begun to ponder the question when set in the context of robotics. We (my research group and colleagues from around the world) are seeking to answer this question with the aim of challenging existing notions of what robots are, how they are designed, built, and controlled, and how they interact with their environment. We ran a workshop on this topic at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference in Yokohama and you can find the...