The Academic Robotics Community in the UK Web based data construction and analysis of a distributed community of practice

This paper explores a scientific community of mainly academic researchers within the discipline of robotics. Data are constructed wholly from web-based resources such as web pages, electronic CVs and bibliographic search engines to identify teams of people working together, career patterns, and the research programmes of this group. Techniques from social network analysis are applied to the data to reveal the structures and relationships within the community. The paper is set within the context of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) and is related to the literature on innovation systems. The paper reveals the structure of the scientific grouping, reveals the importance of key players in the system, and shows that the mobility of scientists is a key factor in both expanding and contracting the community in different locations.