William Hunt MINDS CDT, 2022

Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton

William Hunt is a doctoral researcher working on how people interact with swarms of autonomous robots. Swarm systems are increasingly used in search and rescue, environmental monitoring and defence, but keeping a human operator meaningfully in control of many independent robots is difficult. Too much information can overwhelm the operator; too little can erode trust and make the swarm harder to use effectively.

His research focuses on reducing operator workload and supporting quicker, more confident decisions. This involves studying how people perceive and interpret swarm behaviour and developing new interfaces and control methods. A significant strand of his work uses large language models to allow operators to communicate with a swarm more naturally and respond to changing situations in real time.

His work has been recognised with the Best Demo Award at AAMAS 2023, one of the leading international conferences on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. William has published extensively in this area as lead or contributing author, including work presented at AAMAS, RO-MAN, ACM/IEEE HRI, and ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, alongside a survey of language-based communication in robotics.

He is due to graduate in 2026.