Monday 25 January 2016

w/c 18th Jan: Exams and Strategy


If last week was a week of making, this week has been a week of exam marking. My Mechanical Systems exam struck on Tuesday, and I’ve been marking the papers since. This is time consuming, but over the years I’ve learned how to set questions that are difficult to answer, but easy to mark. So, I’ve spent a lot of time with red pen, totting up marks, and keeping tabs on how the cohort perform on each question.

But you don’t want to know about my exam. What else has been going on this week? Well, I finished building the two new FATKAT manipluandums, and got started on revising the software. I’m making it more flexible, so that you can specify what each input is, rather than being bound by the default. This has meant writing a bunch of code to sort 2D arrays in LabVIEW, but I’m largely there.

Also, we had a Mechatronics and Robotics Strategy day, organised by the newyly-minted Professor Abbas Deghani (by which I mean, newly made a Professor), to discuss our priorities and strategies over the coming year. In particular, it was an opportunity for the new University Academic Fellows to show off their work. Very exciting – and very multidisciplinary. We had lawyers, economists and artists as well as engineers of all stripes. There’s lots to be excited about. For me, in particular, Mehmet Dogar’s work on robotic manipulation ties in very nicely with some of the modelling I aim to do on prehension.

2016 is already shaping up to be an exciting year!

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